The Era of Vertical AI Models
Analysis contrasts Sutton's Bitter Lesson with a rising era of vertical AI models trained on last-mile interaction data, exemplified by Intercom's Apex and Cursor's Composer Two. Post-training on proprietary interaction datasets and reinforcement learning on curated quality data can elevate open-weight base models to meet or exceed frontier-model performance for specific tasks. Resulting effects include model speciation, a shift to in-house fine-tuning on open models, erosion of API-based moats, and a renewed premium on proprietary evaluation data. The AI Daily Brief helps you understand the most important news and discussions in AI. Subscribe to the podcast version of The AI Daily Brief wherever you listen: https://pod.link/1680633614 Get it ad free at http://patreon.com/aidailybrief Learn more about the show https://aidailybrief.ai/
