AI Value Creation ≠ Value Capture: Customers, Not Providers, May Win
Sharp-Prize4632 · reddit · 2026-09-30
The author argues the key AI question isn't whether the tech succeeds but who captures the value: as model quality converges, open-weight alternatives improve and inference gets cheaper, the price of intelligence could fall toward marginal compute cost.
Using the airline industry as an analogy—transformative demand, structurally poor returns—the author sketches a stack where usage explodes, unit costs collapse, providers compete on price, models become interchangeable, and customers capture most productivity gains while margins compress.
Core thesis: value creation ≠ value capture. Winners will likely be those controlling bottlenecks—proprietary data, distribution, embedded workflows, scarce infrastructure—not sellers of generic intelligence. "AI is transformative" and "AI infrastructure is a great investment" are very different claims.
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