'There’s a paradox at the heart of modern AI: The kinds of sophisticated models that companies are using to get real work done and reduce head count aren’t the ones getting all the attention.

Ever-more-powerful frontier and reasoning models continue to nab headlines for smashing cognitive records. They’re passing legal and medical licensing exams, and winning math olympiads. Leaders of major artificial-intelligence labs—from OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei to Demis Hassabis of Google-owned DeepMind and Elon Musk at xAI—talk about a future of “AGI,” artificial general intelligence, in which AIs are as smart as humans.

Supposedly, these AI megabrains are the ones coming for all our jobs.

But when you talk to chief executives at companies that currently rely on AI day in and day out, you hear a different story. For the overwhelming majority of tasks, it’s not the biggest and smartest AI models, but the most simplistic that are winning the day. These unsung heroes of AI, the ones actually transforming business processes and workforces, also happen to be the smallest, fastest and cheapest.'

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