OpenAI launched dots this week: always-on agents with their own cloud computers that can work across connected apps and keep going between conversations. I think this is where inference is headed. My bet is that 95% to 100% of it will run through agent frameworks within two years. A chatbot answers a question. An agent can use the answer to take the next step, check the result and keep working.
The analogy I keep coming back to is fire and the internal combustion engine. Both rely on combustion. One gives you heat; the other puts that energy inside a system that can take you somewhere. Model inference is the primitive. The harness adds tools, memory, permissions and the ability to turn successive inferences into completed work. That makes dots a much more consequential launch than another chatbot benchmark.
The business question is who owns that harness. Build your mission-critical workflows inside one provider’s walled garden and switching models becomes painful. Build them in an open harness such as OpenClaw, Hermes or Pi, and you can change the model behind the agent with a command. Palantir CEO Alex Karp raised a related concern in his CNBC interview: enterprises want control over the business knowledge they put into AI systems. This is exactly what we help middle-market businesses and private equity funds build at Second Mind Systems: agents that do useful work inside the business without making one model vendor the owner of the operating layer.
The economics matter. Reuters reported that Anthropic’s draft IPO prospectus showed $4.6 billion in 2025 revenue, an $8.06 billion operating loss and a $42 billion net loss. As I wrote on LinkedIn this week, projected 2027 data-center capital spending is $1.3 trillion. UBS cites that figure as a consensus forecast for hyperscalers. Where is the money going to come from? And what happens to frontier-lab valuations if customers own the agent layer and make model providers compete for every task? The labs could sell an extraordinary amount of intelligence while the durable margins accrue somewhere else.
Happy Friday.