The model is the swappable part
A new frontier model shipped almost every week this month. OpenAI released GPT-5.6 to everyone after the US government lifted its restriction, launched ChatGPT Work to compete with the same Microsoft Copilot it now powers, and Meta started charging for its own model for the first time — ending its free and open era. Underneath it all, Microsoft is quietly swapping OpenAI out of Word and Excel to cut costs, even as it promotes GPT-5.6 as the preferred Copilot model. The vendors are inside each other's products and against each other at the same time.
The churn is only exhausting if the model is your foundation. It shouldn't be. What compounds in value is the layer above it: the skills that capture how your company actually does its work, the MCP connectors that let any model reach your data and tools, and the evals that let you test a new model against your real work in a day. Build that, and every new model becomes a free upgrade dropped in under work you already own. Skip it, and every week's news cycle is a fire drill.
