The moat is the workflow, not a bigger model.
Because the durable approach is the opposite: smaller, faster, specialized models orchestrated together, not one ever-bigger general model. Even OpenAI orchestrates the long tail of consumer search with smaller models, because a big model would be far too slow. For founders this is the key warning: if your agent’s next step is something generic, like deciding whether a calculator is needed, that is the long tail, and the big models will absorb it, just as Google eventually swallowed the specialized search engines. The defensible business is one where the founder knows the specific stepwise workflow of a domain and chains the right models and rules to serve it.
— The Edge: “AI Agents: The Future of Work?” · Podcast