Just-in-Time Ontologies: What Cheap Intelligence Means for Data — Hrishi Olickel, Southbridge AI
An entity resolution job on Ohio campaign finance records that was projected to cost about $10,000 was completed for under $800 after a newly launched cheap model was dropped into a Southbridge pipeline, with all 23,317 cases ending up with verified labels. Olickel's argument is that this is what cheap intelligence actually changes: transformation is no longer the expensive bottleneck, so there never was a universal schema, and schemas only come together at decision time as just-in-time ontologies. The concrete takeaway is that letting fast, cheap models self-optimize against a defined failure surface beats building for a schema you will never fully know.