Azeem Azhar

It's often all about whether the biggest frontier models are hitting a wall.

The boosters and actually also the more sober minded, calm people in the foundation model lab say they're not close to a wall.

And the evidence does suggest they're probably right there.

The doomers or the skeptics say there's obviously a wall and this thing can't go on or it's already stopped.

But both of those miss the point, because what we're doing there is just looking at a performance curve, the innovation curve.

And you're arguing, especially if you're a doomer, that if the innovation curve can't be guaranteed to continue, the whole of this shebang is just a house of cards.

It's a...

glass house in which you shouldn't throw stones.

But what it does is it misses the importance of the systems that you build around a technology to make it useful.

And these are the things that drive diffusion.

They're the things that make technologies helpful.

That real inflection point, I think, happened at the tail end of 2025, which was the maturity of Claude Code.

It's almost independent of the model that sits below it.

It's a harness of

that helps you get work done.

That harness is traditional code.

It's also the rules around it.

Sometimes traditional programming, sometimes specifications.

And it's what helps that AI system do so well in the particular context of coding, or as we've discovered at Exponential View, lots of other things.

Maria, for example, uses...