Rise of Vertical and Institutional AI Models

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Neil and Eric react to Jensen Huang's bold claim that a $500K engineer should be spending $250K on AI tokens, and why the real answer involves open source. They break down how AI costs are exploding internally, why Cursor's $2B revenue run rate doubled in 3 months, and the rise of vertical AI models. The conversation also covers 7 SEO trends for 2026, how AEO audits expose major gaps, the Agentic Commerce Protocol changing checkout forever, and a live breakdown of IM8's $120M bundle strategy.

Key Takeaways:

• 70-80% of your AI usage should run on open source infrastructure.
• Sites that link to you are the easiest wins for GEO and SEO.
• AEO audits are exposing massive gaps most companies are ignoring.

Chapters: 00:00 Jensen Huang's $250K Token Claim 01:25 Open Source vs Paid AI Tokens 02:40 Eric's $5.6K Monthly Anthropic Spend 03:32 AI Costs Exploding Internally 04:05 Cursor's $2B Revenue & $40B Valuation 05:48 Vertical Models & Intercom's Finn 06:35 SEO Trends for 2026 08:42 Doing SEO via API 09:20 Brand Search Driving Rankings 09:48 AEO Audits With Oracle 10:30 Human-Written Content & E-A-T 11:23 Publishing Where Your Customers Aren't 12:32 Agentic Commerce Protocol & Stripe 15:22 IM8's $120M Checkout Breakdown 18:03 Legion Protein & Supplement Talk

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