Skype has breathed its last. On Friday, Microsoft representatives announced that the company plans to discontinue its video-calling service in early May. Surviving users are invited to migrate for free to Microsoft Teams, the company’s “modern communication and collaboration hub,” which comes with calendar and file-sharing capabilities. It is unclear whether they will take them up on the offer. There’s a chance you already use Microsoft Teams for work; there’s a slightly smaller chance you would never use it for anything else.

Skype was once one of the world’s most-visited websites. Microsoft originally paid $8.5 billion to acquire it in 2011 and introduced the software as a replacement for the then-ubiquitous MSN Messenger. At peak popularity, it became a verb: “I will Skype you” or “are you down to Skype?”. If we analyze the new lexicon, we can see a semantic split. The business use-case is now occupied by Zoom, with researchers identifying this linguistic takeover as early as 2020.

For casual video calls between family and friends, Skype was also overthrown by Apple, which offers a smoother replacement. The not-even-slightly-new term here is “FaceTime” (“Are you free for a FaceTime?” “We FaceTimed for six hours last night”). As with “to Google”, the actual software used is of little consequence to the act of FaceTime. A colleague recently asked if I was free “for a FaceTime” and then placed a call on WhatsApp instead, with her front camera on.

Skype’s demise has little to do with the Covid-era Zoom explosion and lots to do with the post-smartphone tech order: big screen for business, small screen for pleasure. Now that we’re used to being tethered to a handset, calling someone on their computer is an uncool imposition because it necessitates the kind of formal scheduling you’d have to do at a job. Skype had a mobile app, but it was beaten out by smoother and more sensible competitors. FaceTime, for example, has come packaged with the iPhone since 2010. It’s one of only three bright green default icons in the system, the other two being “Messages” and “Phone.” The implication is that all of them are essential and symbiotic. The user who cannot be bothered to exit their chatlog may simply press a camcorder icon to switch to the FaceTime function from within Messages. There’s a copycat function on WhatsApp, which is Meta’s ground-zero for group chats outside the US. The monolith has had video-call functionality since 2016. Facebook Messenger has had it since 2015.

Most people probably already talk to their contacts on at least one of these apps, depending on where they are in the world. Why go to the trouble of signing up to anything else, let alone a product that will force you to add them all over again while creating separate chat histories? Microsoft could have cashed in on this integrated racket were it not for the disastrous run of the Windows Phone, which only made it onto the market when its competitors were already household names. When I was at school, an acquaintance got bullied for having one — the tiled software made them look too much like the computers we had to use in IT lessons. If they had taken off, we might still be Skyping each other today.

It seems silly to mourn software in a tech-skeptic age. But Skype’s death is sad for what it represents. It is a casualty of the age of the desktop computer, which expected far less of our availability and attention than the current smartphone wave. Some people in May will probably try to “Teams” their friends and family members. To the rest of us, they’ll seem odd and quaint, like the last holdouts of a long-gone war.

China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

---

Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

miquelvilam

---