The Great Pivot to AI Agents

Agent Labs, a new category of AI startups that prioritize building high-growth, interactive AI agents rather than training massive foundational models.

While traditional Model Labs focus on fundamental research and massive compute for pretraining, Agent Labs utilize outcome-based pricing and deep product engineering to solve specific user problems.

These organizations often leverage open-weights models and focus their R&D on reinforcement learning and specialized "harnesses" that improve real-world performance.

The author argues that major players like OpenAI and Anthropic are shifting toward becoming AI Clouds, providing the infrastructure for these Agent Labs to thrive.

Ultimately, this shift represents a move from general-purpose intelligence research to practical AI systems that measurably replace or augment human labor.