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Why We Built Our Own AI Layer Instead of Depending on OpenAI or Vertex
The easy path is to wire in a frontier model API and ship. We didn't, and it was the harder choice by a wide margin. The reason comes down to three dependencies you inherit the moment you do — and one wall you can never get past if you do.
Before you read
By Aaron Gammon · Founder, Inferrex · June 2026
This is the strategic companion to my more technical piece on building a self-sovereign AI training loop. That one is about how we improve our own models; this one is about why we own them at all, when wiring in a frontier API would have been so much faster. It's a decision a lot of people are weighing right now, so I want to lay out the reasoning plainly.
Where it touches what Inferrex does, I keep to outcomes, not methods. Live figures, including model status, at inferrex.com/claims.