Thermodynamics is also the limiter in AI these days.

Not necessarily the real limiter, right now, is finding a combination useful and profitable application. Simply charging money for generalized AI access is never going to be the ideal profit center.

>Simply charging money for generalized AI access is never going to be the ideal profit center.

Exactly. Margins are dropping rapidly: https://ethanding.substack.com/p/openai-burns-the-boats

...and to quote a classic, "your margin is my opportunity".

It limits token generation, but not token utility.

AI is two things.

- The chatbot people have a personal attachment to

- The processing tool.

In the second, you only care about the result. Something like Claude Code can call any other provider if that's cheaper and visa-verse. Once I have the result, my dependency / lock-in is no more than a brand of toilet paper. The providers will have to do the 'capitalism thing' and compete.

It's almost like WeWork's, valuated at IT levels by being in the style, only for investors to eventually figure out the marginal production costs are not reducible to near 0, and you can't just bully out competition / network-effect to get a monopoly.

And this applies to any company that wraps and re-sells AI.

Something the tech-VC world is so unfamiliar with, it's scrambling to present the truth of what is 'econ-101' for the rest of the world.