Will AI Kill Lightweight Apps?

Why the most valuable asset in AI won't be the model — it'll be the layer that captures how your business actually makes decisions. In this episode of AI Radicals, host Satyen Sangani sits down with Ashu Garg, General Partner at Foundation Capital and an early investor in one decacorn and six unicorns, to unpack where enduring value in AI will actually accrue. Four years ago, Ashu was non-consensus bullish on open source AI models. Today that view is consensus — and he's moved on to the next thesis: context graphs. Satyen and Ashu dig into the concept of context graphs — an infrastructure layer that captures the decision traces humans generate as they interact with AI applications, scattered across Slack, email, Salesforce, and a dozen other interfaces. They explore why the gap between open source and closed source models is shrinking to roughly six months, why 75% of tasks no longer need a better model, and what that means for the economics of foundation model providers. "The best AI applications will really need to capture decision traces over time and then figure out how to use those decision traces to improve the decisions they make in the future. That infrastructure layer is the context graph. And our belief is that the most valuable asset over time will be the context graph." Listen to this episode to learn: What a context graph is and why it can only be built in the context of a real application — not as a theoretical enterprise-wide exercise Why the six-month gap between open and closed source models means application developers must have open source in the mix, and why two-thirds of enterprise value will continue to be captured at the application layer When to fix problems in the model versus the context layer, and which incumbent application companies Ashu thinks are positioned to survive the AI transition — and which aren't