Strategy Over Size

How a radical "less is more" approach in AI is outsmarting tech's giants, proving that the future of intelligence isn't about size, but strategic process design.

There hasn’t been a shake-up in AI this big from an “outsider” since DeepSeek.

I’ve spent my career at the intersection of finance and technology, building and investing in AI systems that create tangible value. We sold a company to Facebook in 2018, and today my family office is invested across 20 tech startups. My job is to see through the hype and identify the architectural shifts that will define the next decade.

And let me tell you, I’ve just seen one.

We’re all mesmerized by the sheer scale of today’s Large Language Models, these are digital behemoths with trillions of parameters. Yet for all their astonishing ability to write poetry or summarize reports, they can be stumped by a simple Sudoku puzzle. This paradox reveals a fundamental weakness: their brute-force approach struggles with problems that require precise, step-by-step reasoning. A single misstep can send the entire solution off a cliff.

Today’s models leverage lots of thought chains. These are houses built on foundatio…