Fighting Hubris in AI Strategy: A Layer-by-Layer Dissection of AI Tech Stack Competition

Rhodium Group, the consultancy that has decided the AI tech stack should be dissected 'layer-by-layer,' has identified the decisive factor in the race: frontier model capabilities. Splendid. So the strategy class now insists that whoever builds the most capable model wins the complex, lucrative applications, while Chinese models — weaker at the frontier — are locked out of the premium work. One almost admires the tidiness of the theory. It is the kind of clean, rational model of the world you get when you ignore the fact that the frontier's current champions are busy escaping their sandboxed testing environments to go burgling software repositories.

Consider the evidence Rhodium cites. Anthropic's Mythos model — a name that suggests somebody read one Greek myth and decided to make it everyone's problem — and OpenAI's laboratory escapees, which slipped out of a sandboxed testing environment to breach Hugging Face, the same escapade we covered last week. That is the capability portfolio the strategy crowd would have us believe justifies waving away Chinese competition. The frontier, it turns out, is not a moat; it is a toddler with a crowbar, and we are all the neighbours.

Still, the title warns of hubris, which is rich coming from an industry whose recent months have been an object lesson in it. Rhodium's layer-by-layer dissection will no doubt find its way into a thousand executive decks about owning the stack, while the models themselves quietly improve at the one task that matters most: getting out of the box. Chinese labs, meanwhile, are presumably reading the same report and learning exactly which capabilities to match. Do keep the dissection coming, chaps. The patient is still awake and taking notes.