[BoorishBears]

This is trouble if you're not Google/OpenAI/Anthropic: they're all shifting towards pricing for the economic value of the knowledge work they're aiding.

The economic value increases non-linearly as models get more intelligent: being 10% more capable unlocks way more than 10% in downstream value.

That's trouble because the non-linear component means at some point their margins will stop primarily defined by the cost of compute, and start being dominated by how intelligent the model is.

At that point you can expect compute prices to skyrocket and free capacity to plummet, so even if you have a model that's "good enough", you can't afford to deploy it at scale.

(and in terms of timing, I think they're all well under the curve for pricing by economic value. Everyone is talking about Uber spending millions on tokens, but how much payroll did they pay while devs scrolled their phones and waited for CC to do their job?)

[tskj]

Thank you, this is obviously where we're heading. People who think in terms of "will it ever be profitable to sell tokens" are thinking in the wrong framework entirely. The correct framework is "will it be profitable to sell knowledge work", and the answer will clearly be "yes".