Enterprise AIStratechery

Mythos, Muse, and the Opportunity Cost of Compute

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Why I picked this

brilliant read

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The era of Aggregation Theory is behind us, and AI is again making technology expensive. This relation of increased cost from increased consumption is anti-internet era thinking.

Key takeaways

  • Reasoning models (o1) fundamentally break Aggregation Theory by reintroducing marginal costs - compute scales with usage, unlike internet-era products
  • Hyperscalers' business models were built on zero marginal cost assumption; AI inference costs challenge this foundation requiring new economic models
  • The 2010s internet era may be viewed as anomalous 'naive time' - technology returning to capital-intensive, high-marginal-cost paradigm of pre-internet era

Why this matters for operators: Companies building AI products need to rethink unit economics and business models fundamentally different from internet-era playbooks

I cover AI×GTM intelligence like this every Wednesday.

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This analysis was produced using the STEEPWORKS system — the same agents, skills, and knowledge architecture available in the GrowthOS package.