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In April 2026, Uber's engineering leadership discovered that a five-thousand-person team had burned through the company's entire annual AI budget in four months. Per-engineer token costs were running $500 to $2,000 a month, usage had doubled in eight weeks, and the company's COO admitted the surge in spend wasn't translating into proportionally better products (Forbes,Reuters). Uber was not an outlier. The FinOps Foundation's 2026 State of FinOps report found that 73% of enterprises exceeded their original AI cost projections this year, even as the price of a single token kept falling (TechCrunch).
That paradox, cheaper tokens and bigger bills, is exactly the terrain Meryem Arik has spent the last several years mapping. Meryem is Co-founder and CEO of Doubleword, a London-based inference platform that helps enterprises self-host open source and custom AI models (Doubleword), and she was recently interviewed by our Chief Editor, Fawn Hudgens, to talk through what she calls the "hot open weight summer": a moment when cost pressure and a jolt of geopolitical risk are forcing enterprise leaders to rethink how they buy intelligence, not just which model they buy.
