LLMs feel more like CPUs than applications

I’ve been thinking about the current LLM wave and the historical microchip transition.

Microchips were never “products” in themselves. They were compute primitives. The real value emerged in operating systems, developer tools, and applications built on top.

Today, LLMs increasingly feel similar. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc. are building cognitive compute layers. Most “AI startups” look like early PC software – wrappers around a new primitive.

Agents then feel like early operating systems: orchestration layers around probabilistic compute, adding memory, tool access, execution loops.

If this analogy holds, the long-term value might not sit in the base models themselves, but in: - workflow integration - vertical domain systems - data pipelines - distribution - orchestration layers

The open question: Is this closer to the Intel/AMD era (infrastructure shift), or something fundamentally different because the primitive is stochastic and language-native?

Curious how others see the analogy.

1 comment

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0xecro1 4mo ago ↗

It's fundamentally different, and that's exactly why the CPU analogy has an expiration date. Intel never built Windows. The chip layer and the application layer were structurally separated — different companies, different business models, different competencies. That separation is what created the massive ecosystem on top. Frontier labs aren't staying in the chip layer. Anthropic ships the model, the API, artifacts, computer use, MCP — primitive through orchestration through distribution. OpenAI has the model, ChatGPT, plugins, the app store play. They're vertically integrating the entire stack at a speed Intel never could, precisely because the primitive is probabilistic and language-native. When your compute layer already "understands" the task, the gap between infrastructure and application collapses. So short-term, yes, it looks like Intel/AMD. Base models commoditize, value flows to tooling and verticals. But long-term, the labs that own the primitive will likely own most of the stack above it too. The "just build on top" window might be shorter than people expect.