The Four Questions of AI

The piece lays out four coupled questions across the AI stack: how application companies build moats when models can absorb their features, who owns the harness and context layer given evidence that third-party harnesses outperform native ones, when foundation-model training costs stop paying back, and whether credit and power can keep pace with GPU demand. It cites figures including 98% input-token share, a 71% cost cut from smarter harnesses, roughly 83% of agent tasks routing to smaller models, $4t in projected five-year AI data center debt, and a B300 index at $12.29 per GPU-hour. It concludes that the layers behave like a double pendulum—simple individually but chaotic when coupled.