The Rent-Seeking Trap: Why Your AI Strategy Needs a Hard Fork
You just spent six months integrating a frontier model into your core product. You fine-tuned a LoRA, optimized your RAG pipeline, and achieved parity with your competitors. Then, your model provider shifts their pricing, updates their model’s "personality" in a way that breaks your edge cases, or introduces a competing feature that effectively shadows your entire business model. You didn’t build a moat; you built a high-end rental property on land you don’t own.
Centralized AI is beginning to look less like a technological revolution and more like a high-stakes coupon business masquerading as innovation. We are witnessing a massive subsidy of inference costs, burning venture capital to make magic feel cheap while the foundational layers—compute, data, talent, and distribution—coalesce into a handful of corporate monopolies.
The Mirage of Centralized Superiority
The narrative suggests that only trillion-dollar companies can conjure "intelligence." In reality, the foundational model companies are effectively subsidizing...
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