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Start free trial →Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy) · Money & Markets · November 2026
Casado was asked what happens to a frontier lab if it stumbles and goes six months without a new model. He says a model's useful life is very short, unlike software, which has always had a long tail of retention.
…for when we model out the numbers for these companies is what happens if you invest in a model and then you don't get the next model out really quickly. Let's assume that Anthropic stumbles and they don't release a model for six months. What is the lifespan that you think of the previous model?
A very short period of time.
It's very, very short, which is entirely different than we've ever had in software. In software, we've always assumed some long tail. But it turns out what happens if you put out the SODA model and everybody loves it, then something internal happens. I don't know if it's regulatory. I don't know if it's technical. I don't know if it's a breach, whatever. And then you slip three months, right? It could be the case that you lose the entire market. In my experience, and I see a lot of these model graphs from apps, companies, and from pitches, I would say the lifespan of a model is three to six months. So that means you have to release the next model. Model. So, again, for this conversation, I think it's a very interesting conversation. We should tease it apart. Like, what happens if the market continues to grow and doesn't saturate? I think we already know because we have three years of data and it just means the frontier wins and they do a great job and they create great models. And what happens if either the use case is saturated, meaning…
On this trip, I've been asking a lot of people what percent of software coding tasks are already saturated. And the typical answer is very, very high percentage. That's been the biggest market. And yet, it still seems like people are spending like crazy on Frontier tokens to do coding, which it…
Well, these are two different statements. This is a great thing to dig in on, but we need to be very careful. So, statement number one is: I am not using more tokens. I have enough tokens. I've automated 95% already, so I can't automate anyone. And I think that we're getting pretty close to that.…
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