Agentic Era Part 1. A Strategic Inflection Point Where Orchestration and Distribution - Not Model Power - Define AI Moats

The frontier AI race has entered a new phase—one defined not solely by model quality but by orchestration, distribution, and efficiency.

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The frontier AI race has shifted from raw model power to orchestration, distribution, and efficiency, creating a Discontinuity moment for investors seeking asymmetric returns.

As benchmark scores converge—GPT-4o, Claude 3.7, and Gemini 2.5 cluster within 5% on MMLU—intelligence is commoditized, and orchestration layers like Anthropic’s MCP and OpenAI’s 1B-user ChatGPT interface define new moats. Seven players—OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Meta, Mistral, and DeepSeek—pursue distinct strategies, from interface control to enterprise efficiency, visualized in Figure 1’s radar chart. Investors must prioritize firms building financial fundamentals anchored in these new moats —cash flows, margins, scalability—for DCF valuation, not revenue hype.

This is Part 1 of a short series analyzing this strategic inflection point and its implications for building durable businesses in what I'm calling the Agentic Era.