Dan O'Prey ⚡

The big bitter lesson question in the applied AI layer is that as models get better and better, what is the best way to diffuse that intelligence into an enterprise. Ironically, I’d argue that as models are getting more capable, and can handle longer running tasks and better tool use, the ability to differentiate on a domain by domain basis goes up instead of down. When models were quite limited in what they could do, ironically all you could be literally was a “wrapper” because you were effectively delivering tokens back to the user with a custom prompt or some limited RAG. But in a world of agents using tools, tasks that run on for hours or days, workflows that kick off agents, agent swarms that need to be coordinated against a goal, data sources that are domain specific, model routing that requires domain-specific routing, implementation that requires real change management of the workflow instead of “just type into this chat box”, it’s very very possible that specialization of these systems goes up more. Obviously this doesn’t apply to everything - the closer you are to the labs core use-cases the tougher this play gets, but I’d argue we’re going to see autonomous systems for a wide range of job functions that weren’t practical to build out before. We’ll see this in security, life sciences, healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and many other fields. Either way going to be a fun and wild couple of years.