The systems-centric era
Most AI products today use the same models. But they don’t create the same value.
Behind the frontier, increasing AI performance is less about choosing a model and more about building the system around it. Memory, tools, retrieval, workflows, latency, trust, interfaces, evaluation, and how all of those parts work together.
This is where products become much better or much worse, and is the defining characteristic of what I’m calling the systems-centric era.
We always build on what came before. First was the model-centric era. Researchers treated datasets as static and focused entirely on code; tweaking architectures and hyperparameters to beat benchmarks. It drove incredible progress. But benchmarks saturated, and we needed a new path for complex problems.
That led to the data-centric era. The model became the fixed variable, and the engineering effort shifted to the data. We learned that massive quantity mattered, but quality mattered just as much. There’s still a lot of progress to be made here.
We haven’t left either era behind. Today’s models are the product of both. But the practical frontier has moved. The biggest gains now come from the systems wrapped around the model. This is what unleashes the intelligence that’s already there.
It’s why two companies can use the same model and get outcomes that are worlds apart. One ships a demo. The other ships magic. And the difference usually isn’t the model, it’s the engineering.
The Claude Code leak made this clear. What stood out was the machinery built around the model; prompt construction, memory handling, heuristics. The most popular AI product of our time is differentiated by everything but the model.
This pattern is common in technology. We saw it with databases. We saw it with cloud compute. We saw it with smartphones. And now we’re seeing it with AI.
Models will keep improving, and that matters. Everything is downstream of this. But the defining products of the next decade will be the ones that turn raw capability into outcomes. This is the systems-centric era.