Horizontal vs Vertical Agents: Who Wins | Model Routing: Commodity or Increasing in Value | The Future of the Inference Market | Why Founders Should Take Discounts for Tier 1 Firms

Harrison Chase, co‑founder and CEO of LangChain, joins Harry Stebbings to unpack the state of AI agents. They explore why building reliable agents remains difficult, the tug‑of‑war between horizontal and vertical agent stacks, and whether model routing is a real business or a commodity. The conversation touches on the unsolved problem of AI memory, the explosion in AI bills driven by Jevons paradox as token costs plummet, the threat of Chinese AI models, and Harrison’s personal views on where he wouldn’t invest today. The episode closes with his take on whether founders should accept a discounted valuation for tier‑1 VC firms like Benchmark and Sequoia, and a lightning round on over‑valued AI companies.