[ben_w]

It's possible to grow an economy by trillions of real value without any actor being able to extract that as a profit or it even showing up in the books as money.

Consider that Wikipedia is much bigger than Encyclopedia Britanica, but because it is given away to everyone for free, it is not counted as E.B.'s max sale price ($2900 in 1989?) times the world's internet connected population (5.6e9?) — $16 trillion.

AI, regardless of value, are priced at the marginal cost to reproduce weights or run inference depending on which you care about.

But I do mean "reproduce" not "invent" — it doesn't matter if DeepSeek's "a few million" was only possible because they benefited from published research, it just matters that they could.

And if the hardware is the bottleneck for inference, that profit goes to the hardware manufacturer, not to the top ten companies who made models.