The Harness Margin Opportunity

Tomasz Tunguz · 17 Sept 2026 · tomtunguz.com ↗

2 korrents from this piece

Tomasz Tunguz did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
Safely routing AI tasks to cheaper models requires accumulated observation of many prior task outcomes.

Their wordsRouting to a cheap model is only safe if you know which tasks it clears, & that knowledge comes from watching ten thousand versions of the same work.
Our reading
As AI inference costs fall, rising customer expectations will keep service margins from converging toward 100%.

Their wordsMargins will not climb to 100%. As inference gets cheaper, buyers will ask more of their agents, shifting the equilibrium over time in response to competition.