Because selling access to models will not be a good business. But they can form a cartel and keep frontier models to themselves. This will also prevent distillations.
Ultimately the value will be in the data.
We're in a window here where the data is silo'd and we can use agents to vibe code / glue it all together and create traditional apps that people will still use, but I think that window is narrow.
Eventually today's LLM providers will incorporate direct access to more data sources, and the data won't be silo'd for them - it'll all be available. And instead of third parties vibe-coding apps, the LLM companys' web UIs will become the apps that link everything together directly.
And the compute.
Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI(whatever is it called these days) are sitting on mountains of compute.
Yes, local and open-weight models will continue improving, and they'll be good enough for an increasing number of tasks. But there's a difference between making yesterday's capabilities cheap and pushing the frontier forward.
The most capable models will likely continue to demand enormous compute resources, both for training and inference.
And the pricing is already there - we're charged for token usage, not model access. Draft an email, summarize a paper - basically free. But the "big stuff" will require Frontier-models with Frontier-level of compute.
OpenAI spent something like tens of millions on "solving" a Millenium Prize math model. And there will always be another problem worth throwing massive amounts of compute at, whether it's mathematics, scientific discovery, engineering, etc.
I keep wondering if throwing tens of millions at human mathematicians would have gotten similar results.
But the speed and acceleration has the biggest impact on humanity
Let me go on a tangent to make a point. For some countries if you want a US Visa Consulate appt today they only open 3 months out and are booked constantly. They block you for 10mins on the 5th refresh.
It’s well known on crrtain communities that the only way to get one is with an ai agent that can patiently work around this and jump on the bookings with perfect timing or refresh within the bounds of the detection to nab a cancellation opening.
So we’re starting to head into a world where every single person needs an ai subscription just to deal with bureaucracy.
It’s a fucking fantastic business and i don’t understand how you could suggest it’s not good business.
If everyone uses an AI agent as you suggest, the appointment schedule will be bottlenecked just the same as if everyone only used a web browser. Using AI won’t achieve the goal of everyone getting an appointment. So AI won’t actually be useful here if everyone uses it.