“A lot of the enterprise AI products that you see now are about trying to figure out ways to reduce that cost, because they don't want to run the top model twenty-four seven. So you have some sort of gateway or harness system that looks at your jobs and routes them to an appropriately cheap model, so that most of the time you're not using the top-tier intelligence.”

The Register Kettle · November 2026

Context

The hosts had noted that big cloud companies are telling their own engineers to use fewer tokens. Tom adds that enterprise products now route most work to cheaper models, which squeezes frontier labs including Anthropic.

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Transcript

The Register Kettle Around 16:04 into the episode

Tobias Mann

…if their revenues can't keep up with their commute compute commitments, they could default. And that default could turn into a cascade where Mm-hmm. they if they can't pay one bill, they can't get enough compute to generate revenues that are necessary to pay the next bill, and it all falls apart.

Brandon Vigliarolo

…of a larger problem. Right. And that's that people are basically saying what a lot of non AI companies or companies that do AI along with other things like AWS, right, are basically saying we don't need these massive frontier models for the vast majority of business purposes. They're not necessary.

Tom Claburn

Right. Yeah, and and a lot of the enterprise AI products that you see now are about trying to, you know, figure out ways to reduce that cost too, you because they don't want to run, you know, the fable, you know. twenty four seven, so you've got a a way of you have some sort of gateway or or harness system that looks at your jobs and routes them to an appropriately cheap model so that most Mm-hmm. of the time you're not using the you know the the top tier intelligence you're maybe using you maybe just a a decision model or you know a regular classifier or or you know some you know something like Gemma that to just to do language translation. I don't know. It's but you don't always have to use that expensive model and that price pressure is gonna hit them too.

Tobias Mann

Yeah. actually to Tom's point, Cadence Systems, which does a lot of electronic design automation and circuit board layout and that kind of thing, just rolled out a new product line called Maestro that's currently built around NVIDIA's Nemotron, OpenWaights models. But the idea is that they had been…

Brandon Vigliarolo

Yeah. Yeah. Right. And that that again, right, I I can't imagine most businesses are gonna say, well, we're gonna fork over all this money to these proprietary model providers when we don't need those resources. it it just it really makes me wonder, how much of this of this IPO is is basically…

Tom Claburn

Yeah. Go Google was Google was hammered with they lost like five hundred billion in in, you know, stock value based on the fact that their search was underperforming. that's even that bad, but you know, that's you know, that's

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