Almost everyone today is implicitly assuming that the winner will be a single hyper-capable model produced by one entity.

This is a reasonable belief, and it might turn out to be true!

If this belief is true, to compete will require massive capital expenditures to create a competitive model.

You'd then need to take a significant early quality and momentum lead and parlay it into a successfully bootstrapped aggregator play to get staying power.

With Claude Opus outcompeting GPT4 in some areas, it looks like this will be a costly and hard-fought race.

There's an orthogonal bet, though.

You can bet that the quality dimension that will matter is not any one component, but the combinatorial power of the totality of the ecosystem.

If your ecosystem is designed to be open and allow zero-friction safe composition, it will turbocharge the network effects and hopefully eclipse the quality of any one model.

This approach is only possible with the right laws of physics and ecosystem gardening knowhow.

The single-model-to-rule-them-all playbook is taking a traditional cathedral-style approach, whereas the other is taking an asymmetric bazaar-style approach.

One of these bets will turn out to be right in the end.

The latter bet is a judo move: a cheap, asymmetric, non-consensus bet that if it turns out to be right will have massive returns.