We went from simple chatbots to thinking models which massively exploded token utilization.

We then went from simple thinking models to tool calls and agents. Agents, and particularly long horizon agents, burn truly insane numbers of tokens blowing thinking models well out of the water.

People are trying to do agentic swarms as the next step but I don't think those make sense as of right now. Particularly they are just too insanely expensive and not that useful.

Plus right now the models just aren't good at it. It's like early agents when they first started making tool calls.

Agents are really quite bad at using subagents. They don't really internalize how to deploy them and they also don't utilize them in the ways that make sense (produce planning documents, have verifiable artifacts, break down tasks in ways that minimize risk, recognize model limitations in instruction following, iterate on results, etc).

Anthropic is capturing exploding enterprise demand via their agentic tools, OpenAI is failing (relatively) to do so. They’re stuck trying to squeeze more $$ out of consumer chatbots that have reached the second knee of the S-curve.

At some point in the next few years investors are going to want their returns. The only way I see that happening is though an IPO and then… I don’t know if they have a sustainable business model or one in sight.