
A frontier AI company is not a software business — as explored in the shift from SaaS to agentic service models — . It is a capital-intensive discovery operation with a high-margin inference engine attached — and those two halves have almost nothing in common economically.
Understanding the full business model requires holding both simultaneously: the part that burns money to create capability, and the part that monetizes that capability at software-like margins.
The gap between them, and how fast it closes, is the entire investment thesis.
The business runs on three sequential economic layers:
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