[christina97]

Right, but the question is whether the companies producing foundation models will capture that value or not. Right now it seems like tokens might end up just being a commodity sold at cost plus, and companies higher up in the supply chain will make the money. Electricity changed the world but electricity companies capture very little of that value.

[vidarh]

I'm betting on it. I'm working on a project right now where I'm prototyping everything with Claude, until I hit my limits on my MAX subscription for the week. Then I switch to Codex, and start by ironing out harness differences. When I max out that, I switch to a mix of GLM 5.1, Qwen 3.6m, Kimi K2.5 and Deepseek and spend part of the time ironing out issues with them while they work on other parts of the project. Every iteration, the harness gets hardened and the pain of switching to the cheaper/dumber models reduce for the next cycle. The gap reduces each time, and with each new upgrade of the open models. Everything points to the cost/value intersecting in not too long.