A Decade Ago the Smart Money Decided Cybersecurity Was the Trade. Most of Those Companies Are Gone. The Same Money Is Now Buying AI Models — and a Model Is Becoming an Operating System: Two or Three Will Matter, and Most People Will Never Know Which One They're Running.

A decade ago the smart money decided cybersecurity was the trade. It poured in — funds, corporate acquirers, a wave of startups all promising to be the platform. Most of them are gone. The same money is now doing the exact same thing to AI, and the same question applies: does any of this spend make sense? My answer — from someone who ran infrastructure through the last cycle and runs models locally in this one — is that most of it is aimed at the wrong layer. A frontier model is not a product you can own. It is becoming an operating system, and operating systems settle into two or three that matter and a long tail nobody remembers.