OpenAI’s Counterpunch marks the end of the model-size arms race and the rise of architecture as the real frontier of AI performance. Gemini’s coordination and Claude’s discipline exposed the limits of brute-force scaling, forcing OpenAI into a ‘code red’ redesign that birthed Garlic—a pivot from sheer parameter count to durable, parallelized, workflow-safe intelligence. This post unpacks why the future now belongs to models that can route, reason, stabilize, and self-correct under real-world pressure, and why the next era of AI advantage will be won not by the biggest model, but by the most reliably architected one.