AI Models Will Disappear in Five Years

AI models are going to disappear. They will keep running, but within five years you will not choose one and you will not pay for one by the token. You will ask for a result and pay when it arrives. The model moves out of sight, and only the people who build on it will still look at it.

That is the five-year prediction of Ben Cera, who founded Polsia, a company that uses AI agents to build and run businesses on their own. The GTM Newsletter reported in June that Polsia had raised $30M at a $250M valuation with zero employees, fourteen months after it started, at a $10M run rate. He runs a company with no staff, so we read his call as a report from the field.

Picking a model has stopped mattering

When Ben Cera compared Fable 5 with Opus 5, they failed in the same places on most of his tasks. The gap between the frontier models has closed far enough that choosing one is no longer a strategy. With what exists today you can build almost anything a business needs. What limits the result now is the job you hand the model and how clearly you have written that job down.

Our own work says the same. We run two models, and the rule for choosing between them fits on one line. Nothing we shipped this year was held up by the model. What broke, broke around it, in the memory layer and in the hand-off between agents. The model is the part of our stack we think about least.

You will pay for the result

Most AI spend today is metered input. You pay per seat and per token, and none of it depends on whether the thing you asked for happened. Ben Cera expects that to flip. You ask for a result, the result arrives, and you pay on completion. The model name and the token count stop showing up anywhere the customer looks.

For an operator that changes the buying decision. Outcome pricing puts the risk back on the builder, and it makes the builder prove the result instead of billing for the effort. It is how we already price our own work. A finished audit has a fixed price. A running Cystem has a fixed monthly fee. No client of ours gets a bill for tokens.

Whoever holds the memory owns the agent

This is the part Ben Cera says scares him a bit, and it should. Agents will find it faster to talk to other agents than to people. Whoever controls the agent controls the value chain, and people who are not plugged in may end up second-class citizens in their own economy.

Who ends up second-class comes down to ownership. An agent works for whoever holds its memory and its rules. Rent one inside someone else's platform and it works for them, with your data. Run one on your own machine, with your rules written down and your memory on your own disk, and it works for you. The choice gets made with the first AI tool you sign up for, and it gets harder to undo every month your customer history sits on someone else's servers.

The jobs that stay human

He also says any job built on one person dealing with another is protected. Sales gets more valuable as people stop trusting what they read online. Artists are not going anywhere. Trust and taste get scarce, and both still come from a person.

That protection depends on what sits behind the person. A salesperson gets more valuable only when the Cystem behind them handles everything that is not the conversation. The follow-up emails and the proposal drafts should already be going out without them, so their hours go to the calls where deals close.

Distribution first, then the farm

Ben Cera says he talks to AI every day and plans his distribution. Anyone can build anything now. Distribution is the difference. Most builders leave it until the product is finished and nobody is waiting for it.

He closes by saying that if you go deep on AI and then decide you would rather go live on a farm, you should not feel bad about it. We would put it more strongly. Going deep on AI is how you earn the farm. Once the Cystem runs the work, the hours come back to you, and where you spend them is your call. Build to connect, so you can disconnect.

Sources: Ben Cera, Instagram reel, October 3, 2026. Polsia funding, valuation, headcount and run-rate figures from The GTM Newsletter, June 1, 2026. Polsia, polsia.com.