OpenAI and Anthropic are effectively telling the market they can't solve every problem with a generic AI coworker.
— a16z (@a16z) May 27, 2026
You don't pour billions into massive forward-deployed joint ventures if you think the next model release is going to take care of it.
In the cloud supercycle,… https://t.co/WdvxuAV6VJ pic.twitter.com/sKdgvGqh2O
From the article linked in the 16oz tweet:
If you're starting a company, The Yellow Brick Road is the most obvious path to go down, but it's the most dangerous. Take a high performing model, plug in some off-the-shelf connectors (like G Drive, Slack, Salesforce, Notion, GitHub), and ship some sort of agentic orchestration layer on top of that. Magic!
The problem with this is that this is what the labs are doing with Cowork and Codex. Obviously, they own the model, which gives them better margins, control, and the ability to exert pricing power on anyone who's downstream from them. But maybe most importantly also own the architectural choices that define what their products are built to solve well. They've been deliberate so far about the model plus tool calls pattern, and this is exactly what horizontal low-step-count work on the road requires. Even if a startup could somehow outperform Codex or Claude Code, the labs have massive distribution arms and the biggest brand halo in AI.
If you're an AI app company running that playbook with the same connectors, no sub-agents or configuration below it, and no distribution, you're likely walking down the road to nowhere.
H/t Gary Marcus
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