tech
Executive Briefing: Run the $40 question on your org this week. If nobody can answer it, you've found your real AI bottleneck.
Part of my job is to look out ahead. When everyone in AI is saying the same thing at the same time, that’s usually the signal to stop asking whether the consensus is right (it often is) and start asking where the advantage goes once everyone has acted on it. Right now everyone is saying the same thing: route to cheaper models. Fable 5 was the spark that lit this fire. At $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output, double Opus 4.8, the newest frontier model showed up with a price that turned every leadership meeting into the same meeting, and now that meeting is spreading everywhere: do we have to pay for this, or can we route around it?
TL;DR
- Routing to cheaper AI models is becoming a universal practice, diminishing its competitive advantage.
- The real differentiator in AI will be technical and organizational imagination.
- A $40 experiment highlights that advantage forms once execution becomes cheap, independent of model price.
- A suggested two-layer setup uses cheap, open-weight models as the engine and frontier models for steering.
- A simple diagnostic question can identify the true AI bottleneck in an organization.