OpenAI engineer: frontier token demand keeps growing even if model intelligence plateaus
iaindunning · x · 2026-10-28
OpenAI engineer iaindunning shared a takeaway from internal observations:
- Even if frontier LLMs "paused" indefinitely, the world would keep extracting substantially more value, and demand for frontier tokens would keep rising — and it's still very early, with huge unlocked demand beyond his own vantage point
- Yet total spend is unclear: in a locked-intelligence world, spend could grow, or margins could compress severely
- The deeper question is value distribution: AI's value splits across the foundry, chip designer, lab, and consumer layers — revenue can be counted at every layer, but profit cannot be double-counted. He finds it hard to believe it all accrues to the labs
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