Build vs rent an LLM: own your company's brain — memory, decisions and data first
petrusenko_max · x · 2026-11-07
A founder building an AI agent product faced the classic question: train your own LLM or keep renting one? The author's framework: if you can't build everything, decide what you must own.
Key points:
- Own the company's brain: conversations, memory, decisions and data must be in-house; make models replaceable and buy everything else;
- Memory first: build a durable, permission-aware conversation and event layer — recoverable, auditable, routable;
- Measure outcomes, not just engineering metrics: task success/failure, latency, cost per successful task — plus deals closed and revenue generated;
- Keep providers interchangeable: benchmark self-hosted open-weight models against frontier APIs with identical tests, quality thresholds and cost budgets;
- Revisit build-vs-buy monthly with a designated owner.
Conclusion: nobody knows which model leads a year from now, but you can build a company that swaps models without losing its brain.
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