Small models, sharpened teeth
Distillation is eating the mid-tier — a field report from the frontier's cheap seats.
The interesting models this quarter are not the biggest ones. Distillation has quietly collapsed the mid-tier: small models with sharpened teeth now do the work that a frontier model did a year ago, at a fraction of the cost.
That reshapes what is worth building. When capability gets cheap, the differentiator moves up the stack — into taste, workflow, and the surface a user actually touches.
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“Cheap capability rewards good design. That is the whole thesis of the studio.”
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