Stratechery: the AI race is now a fight over verifiable data, from Meta's Muse to Grok 4.5

Stratechery·medium signal

Ben Thompson threads Meta's Muse Image release, Grok 4.5, and Alex Karp's CNBC appearance into a single argument: as pretraining corpora exhaust, the differentiator becomes proprietary access to data whose ground truth can be checked. That reframes Palantir-style enterprise data positions and Meta's social graph as strategic assets rather than legacy ones. Analysis rather than announcement, but it's the sharpest available synthesis of why frontier labs are suddenly buying data pipelines instead of GPUs.