alt Hacker News> that money doesn’t migrate to the AI lab. It evaporates.
No, someone still has to pay the subscription. AI Labs don't care who uses the tokens and how. If Adobe goes under someone else is going to take their place. Suprise, surprise: they will also use tokens.
> It’s a very expensive way of shooting yourself in the foot and sending the bill to your investors. <CoreWeave bonds chart>
I'm not sure how CoreWeave bond chart is even remotely relevant here. They are not even an investor.
> They are just mining the asteroid, dumping the silver onto the market for $20, and watching the price of their own product plummet to zero.
The lab's own product is the model. How is someone building a weekend project going to plummet the value of their model? It's the opposite!
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No one has to pay for tokens with open weight models.
No one will be able to pay for tokens if their product is replaced by OSS created by open weight models.
> AI Labs don't care who uses the tokens and how.
True, with one exception: they do care if people are using the tokens to distill their own models. There is just not that much they can do about it except for clumsy heuristic type protections that will never really work.
Even if AI labs don't really care if they are getting paid by companies or individuals currently, they do have two pretty big problems to worry about.
One is competition from "open" models and just the complete lack of any moat for anyone this many years into things, and the second is that if all the software developers who are writing vibe coded clones of commercial software actually do lose their day jobs because the software companies they worked for go under (and if there are no more jobs for them to go to because this is happening everywhere), they eventually won't be able to afford the big lab subscriptions for personal use, so both pools of customers for the AI labs collapse in a related way.
I do think the linked substack post has some serious deficiencies in its analysis but at the same time it at least starts to sniff out that commoditizing knowledge collapses everything for everyone in ways that will be incredibly destructive to our current economic system.
> No, someone still has to pay the subscription. AI Labs don't care who uses the tokens and how.
Some dev or company might pay for a subscription (or self-host an open weight model) for maintaining that Photoshop clone, but the millions of people that were paying for Photoshop could simply stop paying and use the free/cheap alternative.