It's the Harness, not the Horse - on How AI Models are Commoditizing

There is a particular kind of person who, upon meeting a champion racehorse, immediately asks how fast it can run a quarter mile. Magnificent animal. Tremendous lungs. Genuinely the fastest thing on four legs you will ever stand beside. And also, if you hand it a field and a plow and ask it to feed a village, completely useless until somebody invents the harness. We are all, collectively, standing in the paddock asking about the quarter mile. For three years the entire discourse around artificial intelligence has been a horse race in the most literal sense. Which model is smartest. Which one nudged ahead on some benchmark by 1.3 points. Which lab dropped the new weights at midnight to ruin a competitor's launch morning. We have treated raw model capability as the whole game, as if intelligence were a substance you could bottle and sell by the liter, and whoever bottled the strongest stuff would win civilization. This was always a slightly silly way to think about it. It is becoming an…