The Sequence Opinion 951: the whole AI stack wins

By TheSequence · Thu, 15 Oct 2026 11:02:06 +0000.

The email is The Sequence's opinion installment number 951. The body received contains only the opening of the piece, so this summary is limited to what appears there.

The author offers an everyday example: asking an agent to rearrange a trip after a flight is canceled. The agent finds a replacement flight, checks the calendar, changes the hotel booking and asks for the user's approval before paying.

According to the text, to the user this feels like a single product. In economic terms, however, it is a small supply chain made up of an application, a model, live data, safety controls and compute capacity.

From there, he raises the question of who captures the value. The instinctive answer, he says, is to pick a layer: infrastructure owns the scarce resources, models own the intelligence and applications own the customer. Under that framing, one of these layers would eventually absorb the others.

The author argues that this framing is wrong. His thesis is that every layer will work, because each solves a different problem and can sustain durable businesses.

He qualifies that not every company will survive and not every valuation will make sense. Even so, he considers it more likely that AI will create several interdependent profit pools than a single winning layer.

The text ends by announcing "Three theories, one missing variable...". The development of those theories and the variable is not included in the body of the email, so it cannot be summarized here. The full article is on The Sequence's website, on Substack.