Comment by jpatt

The Growth aspect mentioned is that VCs are subsidizing the bill right now, so it is hard to know if at the current moment the demand curve would promote as much usage without it, but assuming demand remained constant (not even growing), you could expect token prices to be competed down. It is a commodity without a moat.

Now that we have pretty decent open source models, anyone can create a new business to supply more tokens. Sure there’s short term scarcity: energy, GPUs, cooling, but this is a scale up problem. More token demand = more data center build = more energy plant build. This downward pressure will also keep frontier private model prices in check.

Differentiation seems to be happening at the harness level, whereby we can expect token spend to be a metric to compete on and drive down for the customer (at least hoping tools in the application space don’t continue token based billing as their primary revenue stream).

These are not short term hyper growth forces, but a fundamental alignment of incentives.