Enterprises are better off paying for ad hoc frontier model access than rushing to build cheaper structured workflows, because cheaper models have only recently become good enough to deliver comparable results, and only after a lot of work.
Nathan argues that despite the appeal of economizing with cheaper models and structured workflows, frontier models like Fable still deliver more reliable value on an ad hoc basis right now. ✦ AI generated
Nathan · The Cognitive Revolution · 2026-07-02 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 52:05
the frontier models still have the juice where if you're using them on an ad hoc basis, you're going to get value. You're going to know where that money went. And even if you're structuring things, which is a good goal to have, you probably don't want to rush into trying to structure them with a much cheaper model because it's only recently been possible with a lot of work to get comparable results.
verbatim transcript · starts at 52:05
52:05serve enterprise, I think that same strategy is kind of what I would say like the frontier models still have the juice where if you're using them on an ad hoc basis, you're going to get value. You're going to know where that money went. And even if you're structuring things, which is a good goal to have, you probably don't want to rush into trying to structure them with a much
52:38cheaper model because it's only recently been possible with a lot of work to get comparable results. >> And even if you are going to go, you know, finding you can do that, who is going to do it best? Probably still the frontier models, even more, you know, than your own people in a vast majority of cases. So, and then while you wait too, of course, they're doing all this integration,
52:59right, of of the native routing. Uh, so yeah, I guess I I kind of still feel like all roads lead back to fable sort of uh if you're really going for performance. And if you're not going for performance or you're you're you're you know really prioritizing risk or you're really prioritizing IP then I think you do have another question on your hands of just like how long can you
53:26do that before because you know in addition to cloud for science they also just announced a whole biomedical initiative right they're going to go try to cure rare diseases which I think everybody should be excited about except for maybe the pharma companies that are trying to do like highly controlled you know, structured buildout type things while meanwhile Anthropic is just Revan tokens at the frontier and, you
53:54know, potentially coming for you real quick. Um, so the way I I saw Flo Carllo's uh Alaltimore's uh post uh as they as they started to switch into open source and he and he was explicit that you know they like they'd spent so much money on claude and um you know open source was finally good enough. I think the open source being finally good enough is just an artifact of the