An industry can be enormous, essential, and capital-destroying at once — mobile data grew orders of magnitude while the stocks went nowhere.
The comparison’s weak joint: telcos sold a genuinely undifferentiated commodity, where model outputs still differ in ways buyers can perceive. Whether that persists is exactly the open question.
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supports →Every path away from foundation models becoming commodity infrastructure requires something to change; commoditisation is the default.The concrete precedent for the default case: a trillion in revenue, $200bn of capex, and all the value captured by people further up the stack. Essential and profitable are independent properties.