The AI Scaling Era Is Over. The Next Frontier Is Experience and Design.

For the last five years, the story of AI has been the story of scale. Bigger models. More parameters. Massive training runs. Ever increasing compute. It created step change improvements that felt unstoppable. Every few months, the frontier moved forward.

But that era is ending.

Ilya Sutskever captured it clearly: we are moving from the age of scaling to the age of research.

The frontier models are still improving, but the returns are slowing. The largest labs can scale further, but the breakthroughs will be smaller and less frequent. Companies building on top of LLMs can already feel the shift. The advantages no longer come from having access to the biggest model. They come from what you do with the model.

The power is moving to the application layer.

And the application layer is defined by two things.

Experience.

Design.

This is where the next decade of product innovation will be won.

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Why scaling is no longer the advantage

Scaling gave us incredible capabilities.

Reasoning improved.

Language understanding exploded.

Code generation became real.

Agents became practical.

Multimodal models arrived faster than anyone expected.

But scaling had limits baked in.

Compute is expensive.

Data is finite.

Training windows are long.

Energy costs are rising.

Model improvements are flattening.

The gap between last year’s best model and next year’s best model is shrinking. Once everyone has access to frontier level capabilities, size stops being a differentiator. A thousand different apps will have access to the same intelligence.

When models become commodities, advantage shifts elsewhere.

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The new competitive frontier is the experience layer

If everyone has access to similar model performance, the question becomes: who creates the most valuable, usable, trustworthy, delightful experience on top of it?

This transforms the work of product teams.

Experience becomes strategy.

Design becomes core infrastructure.

Workflow design becomes a superpower.

Here is where the real differentiation will show up.

Speed and predictability

Users will prefer products that feel instantaneous, stable, and consistent. Frontend performance and feedback timing matter more than the model behind the scenes.

Interaction design

The shape of the interface determines how people think about the system.

Linear chat is already outdated.

Structured flows, mixed interactions, and intelligent UI become the new baseline.

Context and memory

Products that maintain continuity, remember the user, and adapt to their intent will outperform tools that treat each prompt as a one off.

Guardrails and trust

People will gravitate to products that behave reliably.

This is not a model problem.

It is an experience design problem.

Taste

As capabilities converge, taste becomes a moat.

Teams that make elegant decisions will stand out.

This is why the best AI native products today feel less like chatbots and more like well crafted software with superpowers.

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Design becomes the hardest and most valuable part of AI products

Design used to be about layout, typography, spacing, and components. AI reshapes the job completely. Now, design includes:

• sense making
• flow architecture
• intent inference
• feedback timing
• error recovery
• expression of agency
• control and transparency
• trust signals
• task decomposition
• capability routing

This is where the product lives.

The intelligence is inside the model.

The usefulness is inside the experience.

The winners will be the teams who treat design as a cognitive system rather than a visual artifact.

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Why the best AI products will have the most opinionated UX

The biggest mistake teams make is assuming users want infinite flexibility. They don’t. They want structured empowerment: the feeling of being supported without being overwhelmed.

AI native UX will lean towards:

• guided choices
• contextual actions
• adaptive UI
• progressive autonomy
• clear guardrails
• predictable behaviour
• fast recovery paths

The magic is not that the model can do everything.

The magic is that the product makes the right thing feel effortless.

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The new job of PMs and product teams

If the era of scale favoured labs, the era of experience favours builders.

The PM’s job shifts from “what feature should we build” to “how should this intelligence express itself so that the user gets value quickly and reliably”.

This means PMs must excel at:

• multi model workflow design
• interaction patterns
• constraint design
• continuous testing
• memory and context management
• system behaviour mapping
• smooth state transitions
• user trust loops
• taste and simplicity

This is the craft.

It has almost nothing to do with scaling parameters.

It has everything to do with shaping experience.

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The future belongs to teams who design meaningfully

Most companies will still focus on prompts, models, and raw capability. But the ones who win will focus on the layer the user actually touches.

The apps that stand out will be:

• faster
• more intuitive
• more stable
• more trustworthy
• more intentional
• more human
• more opinionated

They will feel less like tools and more like intelligent environments.

They will hide complexity.

They will expose clarity.

Scaling built the foundation.

Experience will build the companies.

The next breakthroughs will not be bigger models.

They will be better products.

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