Meta’s Glimmer release this week is a deliberately timed argument. The open-weight model, downloadable and runnable on your own hardware, landed alongside a 6,500-word letter from Mark Zuckerberg insisting AI should be “for everyone” rather than locked inside a few labs’ APIs. The contrast with Muse Spark — Meta’s more capable model that remains gated behind the company’s own infrastructure — wasn’t lost on Equity hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Rebecca Bellan. Open sourcing the less powerful model while keeping the crown jewel proprietary is a familiar playbook, and the hosts waste no time pointing out the asterisks.
The energy math, though, is where the conversation gets uncomfortable. Amazon’s planned Texas data center carries a price tag that’s starting to look like a rounding error compared to the grid strain it represents. Startups are scrambling to patch the problem: Form Energy just raised $750 million for 100-hour iron-air batteries, Reservoir put $8 million behind smarter water heaters, and Discovered Materials is hunting for chips that don’t run hot. That’s real money chasing a problem the open-source debate barely acknowledges.
Elsewhere in the week’s chaos: Anthropic added watermarks to generated text and users are, predictably, annoyed. Joby Aviation’s $500 million defense contractor acquisition has Korosec drawing parallels to last year’s Blade deal, with the 2028 LA Olympics looming as a curious backdrop. And the VideoVerse-Minute Media deal — a $250 million transaction — has allegedly collapsed into forged documents, multiple lawsuits, and a CEO nobody can reach.
It’s a fitting snapshot of where AI finds itself in 2025: the models are increasingly free, but the infrastructure they demand is anything but. Zuckerberg can argue the software should belong to everyone. The question nobody’s answering is who pays for the power bill.
