A New Axis of Competition

Would you choose one software over another because it has a proprietary model with better performance?

Two companies shipped custom AI models today (three in a week counting Cursor!¹), raising that question. Intercom launched Apex 1.0, a model for answering customer support tickets.² Chroma released Context-1, a model for multi-hop agent search.³

Apex 1.0 beats GPT-5.4 & Claude Opus 4.5 on customer service tasks.² Context-1 scores 97% on agent search benchmarks.³ One Intercom gaming customer saw resolution rates jump from 68% to 75%.²

History suggests⁴ these gains may be temporary. As general-purpose models improve, today’s specialized advantage erodes. But with GPU shortages, inference costs will spike, perhaps this will be the moment for built-for-purpose more efficient models.

Intercom built Apex to differentiate in a competitive market. Chroma’s bet is different. Context-1 is open-source under Apache 2.0.³ Anyone can use it. The model isn’t the product. It’s marketing rather than sales. Distribution & brand building for their vector database infrastructure.

Two philosophies. Proprietary model as differentiation versus open-source model as adoption mechanism.

“As features become ~free to build, the technology factors that will differentiate the players will be the AI under the hood. If you’re using the same general-purpose off-the-shelf model as everyone else, you have no durable differentiation.” - Eoghan McCabe²

AI models offered by software vendors have become a new axis upon which to compete. In the marketing arena, models drive attention & distribution. At the bottom of the sales funnel, they serve as competitive differentiators in performance.