Four theses are fighting for supremacy in artificial intelligence right now — scaling still works, the paradigm is peaking, the buildout is on track, the public is coming around. Each has primary-source support; none can be honestly crowned or dismissed. This episode holds them at educated-observer altitude across capacity, forecasting, the Anthropic-OpenAI shift, Musk as compute landlord, the three-horse race, post-transformer and quantum threads, the public-perception trend, and the agent-versus-chatbot return-on-investment split.

AI Disclosure: This episode was produced with AI assistance. Research synthesis and script writing used Claude (Anthropic) under human editorial direction. Audio narration by Microsoft Edge TTS (en-US-AndrewNeural voice).