Follow up: AI Wars: What happens if My LLM doesn't win
Many of you asked right after my last post this question
A Warning About Your Backbone
Right now, companies are quietly rebuilding their entire backbone on top of LLMs.
- Internal copilots.
- RAG systems.
- Workflow routing.
- Search.
- Reasoning.
- Decision assistance.
- Knowledge memory.
- Context flow.
It feels modular.
But it’s all sitting on one bet.
And here’s the part no one is saying out loud:
The amount of money being burned in this race is unsustainable.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI—
They’re spending hundreds of millions per month in GPU cycles, infrastructure, inference cost, and model R&D.
They’re not just trying to win market share.
They’re trying to win mindshare, lock-in, and long-term platform dominance.
It’s not just a race.
It’s a war for total interface control.
And when that war ends?
One or two winners will control the pipes.
The rest will need to raise prices, cut models, or collapse.
So Ask Yourself:
What does your company look like when GPT is your entire backbone—
but Apple wins?
What happens when:
- Apple ships a local GPT-me agent with system-level access?
- Siri is suddenly useful—and private?
- Your customers move toward embedded intelligence over cloud queries?
- GPT becomes middleware instead of the core platform?
If your entire knowledge system, team workflows, customer support, or product logic is hardwired to one LLM provider—
You’re not just integrated.
You’re dependent.
What to Do Right Now
- Build an abstraction layer.
Make sure your agents, copilots, and knowledge workflows can switch models without being rebuilt from scratch. - Design for interoperability, not allegiance.
Claude, GPT, open weights, fine-tuned models—you need optionality. - Audit your backbone risk.
Where are you overcommitted to a company whose infrastructure cost exceeds its margin? - Own your context.
Your biggest asset isn’t the model. It’s your company’s memory, logic, decision history, and reasoning structure. Don’t rent it—own it.
One Last Thought
This isn’t just a platform war.
It’s a war for how business itself will function.
In 2026, the cost of access may go back up.
The APIs may shift.
The terms of service may change.
And when that happens, the question won’t be:
“What can this model do for us?”
It’ll be:
“Did we build a business that can survive the shift?”
Not who used AI.
But who designed for independence, clarity, and system-level resilience.
That’s the real endgame.
That’s what’s under construction now.
More soon,
Gage Batten
Under Construction
How work is being rebuilt in real time
