US companies are running more AI workloads than ever, and they are paying less for them. That is the main finding of the latest Ramp AI Index, compiled by Ramp economist Ara Kharazian.
The two lines are moving in opposite directions. Spending peaked in July and has fallen since. Usage has climbed about 50 percent over the same period and reached a record high at the end of September.
Why the bill is shrinking
Kharazian identifies two causes:
Price cuts on top models. The most capable models have become cheaper to call.
Better budget options. Standard and lite models have become cheaper and more efficient, so more work can move to lower-cost tiers.
IBM has released a self-hosted version of IBM Bob, its agentic software development platform. Companies can now run AI-assisted development and application modernization on their own infrastructure instead of sending code to an outside service. The option covers on-premises data centers, private clouds, sovereign clouds and fully air-gapped environments. A sovereign cloud keeps data under a specific country's or region's jurisdiction. An air-gapped environment is cut off from external networks entirely.
The target customer is clear. These are organizations whose source code is sensitive, whose data is regulated, or whose systems are too critical to expose to an externally hosted AI tool. IBM is pitching the release to financial services, government, healthcare and critical infrastructure, and to any business worried about protecting its intellectual property.
Google has put one of its own AI chips into orbit for the first time. A prototype compute satellite carrying a Google Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) lifted off on a SpaceX rocket from California. It is the first hardware test of Project Suncatcher, the company's plan to build large compute clusters in space.
On the same day, Google published a peer-reviewed version of its white paper on orbital data centers. The paper sets out how much has to change before the idea becomes practical, and much of that depends on SpaceX's Starship flying far more often than it does today.
Shopify has launched Canvas, a site-building tool that lets merchants put together their online store through a conversation with AI. The company announced it on Thursday. The idea is straightforward: describe what you want, watch the store change, and keep refining until it looks right.
The change is less about adding AI to Shopify and more about how store building itself works on the platform.
From blocks and themes to a chat window
Shopify was not short on site-building options before Canvas. Its existing no-code builder was reasonably capable. Merchants picked a theme and then edited it by moving modular sections and blocks around. That approach covered a lot of ground, but it had a ceiling. Anything beyond the standard layout options meant opening the code or paying a developer.
Microsoft has added three new models to its MAI family, all aimed at the same goal: voice agents that can hold a conversation without awkward pauses. The headline release is MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming, the company's first streaming transcription model. It ships alongside two text-to-speech models, MAI-Voice-2.1 and MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash.
The target audience is developers. Microsoft wants them to build agents that listen to a speaker and respond almost immediately, closer to the rhythm of a human conversation than the stop-and-wait pattern of many current assistants.
How the streaming model works
MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming receives speech over a WebSocket connection and returns a transcript that keeps updating while the person is still talking. When the speaker stops, the model marks the transcript as final.
CyrioX is financed by advertising. You can choose how you want to use this website:
With advertising: we load an advertising script from a third-party ad network. The ad network may set cookies, use your IP address and device information, and may process data outside the EU. We also count your visits for our own visitor statistics (with a random ID stored in your browser).
Ad-free for €0.99 per month: no advertising and no advertising tracking. Cancel at any time.
You can change your decision at any time via "Cookie Settings" at the bottom of every page.
