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Start free trial →The Vergecast · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026
The hosts were discussing Anthropic's S-1 and its push into sector products like Claude for legal work. Pierce says conversations with people in AI suggest that having the leading model may stop being how companies win.
Right.
And that's just a lot of work. And there's a lot of competition for it. Yeah.
And you have to convince all of those people that your tool on top of your model is better than the vast quantity of specific enterprise software they already have, which is hard. Anybody who has ever tried to sell to an IT manager at a company knows that is very, very, very hard work. And they have to do that at such pace and such scale that just seems virtually impossible. All of this has moved faster than anybody expected. So like, who knows? But all of that is like, that is different from we just have to keep building bigger models. So we need to spend a theoretically infinite amount of money on compute. And to that point, actually, there is a sense in a lot of conversations I'm having with AI people and to some extent in this S1 that actually maybe we are going to fairly quickly hit a phase where just having a leading model is not how you win. That having better products or more tuned products or other things that a company like Google is much better set up to do, like vast quantities of customer support is just the thing that's going to be the actual differentiator rather than we have a slightly better model on…
very curious about this dynamic. Look, if I was young and ambitious instead of old and committed to the revenue-free career of journalism, I do love it. You would just start a company and you would take some cheap to run, but pretty capable model and you would just run around all the businesses in…
Yeah. And they kind of have to.
It's unclear the entire economy needs frontier intelligence.