Tomasz Tunguz · 14 August 2026 · Industry Analysis

Honestly, Who Buys SOTA?

Tomasz Tunguz, MD @ Theory

State-of-the-art LLM adoption is stalling—84% of tokens on OpenRouter use non-frontier models delivering 77% of frontier performance at 2.5% the cost. As the gap closes, enterprise consolidation and price elasticity suggest frontier models will struggle to justify training spend unless they win differentiated use cases like security or software architecture.

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Topics: AI (Horizontal)

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