GoKawiilHacker News debate questions why OpenAI and Anthropic sell AI tokens instead of building products
A discussion thread on Hacker News raises the question of why leading AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic primarily sell model access as tokens rather than using their own frontier models to build and launch consumer or enterprise products directly. The poster argues that as token prices fall due to commodification, more profit potential may lie in building applications on top of models rather than selling raw model access.