The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) · Saturday, September 26, 2026
Pagg Agrawal challenges the consensus view on the split between open and frontier models, suggesting the 90/90 split might be inaccurate. He argues that a useful small model can be 1000X cheaper than a frontier model, and it's difficult to predict which use cases will align with which model scale over time.
“Do you agree with the consensus view that you'll have 90% of token activity go through open models, but 90% of dollars go through frontier models? I don't think it will be 90% on either of those, actually.”
“Why? So if you believe my claim that a useful model and a frontier model are 1000X off in price from each other. So the small model is still useful.”
“It is hard to know which use case over time will get optimized to which scale of model in between.”