The Labs Will Stop Selling Their Best Models
TL;DR: the big AI labs will keep selling tokens, but within a few years that won't be their main business. Open-weight models are closing the gap, Chinese labs are copying the frontier at scale, and the best models are getting too dangerous to release to everyone. The labs will keep their best models and point them at problems worth more than tokens: a proof, a molecule, a financial model, a diagnosis. You can already see them doing it.
Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft plan to spend about $725 billion on data centers this year, and OpenAI alone plans about $750 billion of compute through 2030. That money is supposed to come back through tokens, and tokens are getting cheap much faster than most people expected, myself included.
In August, the AI safety nonprofit SaferAI found that Z ai's GLM-5.2, an open-weight Chinese model, was only two to four months behind GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.7, and level with Opus 4.7 in biology. On OpenRouter, a service developers use to send their requests to hundreds of different models, the lab with the biggest share of requests last week was DeepSeek, a name most people in America and Europe have never heard of.
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