Unbundling

Chapter 1: The Great Unbundling

In the spring of 2025, a peculiar kind of tremor ran through the technology industry. It wasn’t a market crash, though it would rattle portfolios. It wasn’t a product launch, though it involved a piece of software. It was the quiet, almost inertial release of a file—a set of numbers, really—that signaled the end of an era. Anthropic had released a version of its Claude model with weights that were, if not fully open, at least no longer locked in a vault. And in the same quarter, OpenAI, the company that had become synonymous with the centralized promise of artificial intelligence, began to speak openly about the architectural limits of its monolithic approach. Not as a failure, but as a phase. The era of the single, all-powerful model, trained on everything and deployed everywhere, was drawing to a close. In its place, something more granular, more chaotic, and far more interesting was emerging.

This is the story of that emergence. It is not a story about a single technology, but about a structural shift in how the digital world is built. For two decades, we have lived under the architecture of consolidation. The platforms—Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple—were not just companies; they were gravitational fields. They absorbed startups, standardized user behavior, and made the internet legible by making it centralized. Search was a box in a browser. Social was a feed in an app. Commerce was a cart on a website. The protocols of the early