alt Hacker News> 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.
> open models
They are banking that a bigger model can get distilled (internally) into a more capable smaller model as opposed to training that model without having access to the bigger model in the first place. Majority of the value generation seems to be happening at the frontier though, not in smaller models, and I'm not sure that gap will shrink any time soon.
> all engineers lose their jobs
They want to replace engineers with agent swarms. At that point it stops being a tool and they can charge for outcome. They might get there, or we might still need "qualified steerers" in the future. Who knows