Bose: Customizing model weights is a waste of R&D resources
Arnab Bose · Should Software Companies Embrace AI or fight it? — With Asana Chief Product Officer Arnab Bose · Apr 7, 2026 · at 32:52
Arnab Bose, Chief Product Officer of Asana, discusses why enterprise software companies should build on frontier APIs instead of customizing open-source models.
0:00 / 0:27exact quote · 27.8s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Our sort of maximalist thinking is that the frontier labs are going to keep innovating in the level of reasoning and capabilities of their models, and so trying to create these customizations or adding our own token weights Is not a good idea and is a waste of R&D resources at this particular point in time because of the rate of innovation that we're seeing.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Arnab Bose
Bose: Non-software companies will fail by building in-house AI coordination tools
“These companies are, you know, are not going to be successful if they end up spending their tokens and their cost on achieving these outcomes that are more about coordination between human beings and AI agents.”
Bose: Forking open-source models leaves software companies 3–6 months behind
“If you create a fork and you're always three to six months behind what your, Competition could be doing. You know, like there'll be other companies, I'm sure, who are thinking about some of the challenges that we are addressing at Asana. I don't want to be thr…”
Bose: AI agent automation will elevate human tastemakers' output and velocity
“Yeah, it should elevate the people who are tastemakers, who really understand the, their craft, to be able to do a lot more with their time, right? So they'll, they'll just be able to produce more, they'll be able to produce higher quality output, they'll, the…”
Bose: Enterprise AI stalls because generic outputs slow down human reviewers
“Today, I don't think customers are getting, like, in general, as people have been embracing AI, they aren't getting that level of exponential output or maybe the right way to say it is they aren't getting the level of exponential outcomes from their investment…”
Bose: Separate specialized AI agents are safer than single master agent
“My personal philosophy is, like, you probably want, like, different agents that are great at doing different things and that actually have some separation in their memory because, There's probably a very complicated challenge where like, let's say your agent i…”
Bose: Historical enterprise coordination data is ideal context for AI agents
“Now, the interesting thing that the coordination engine brings to the table is that not only does it define who does what by when, but it also has a track record of how were those projects completed in the past, what happened when that particular project went …”