No one is getting rich from selling tokens anymore AI labs are making the same mistake that crypto did with the "Fat protocol" back in 2017, and they are scrambling to change course For those that don't know, the "Fat protocol thesis" predicted that protocols (L1s) would capture the great majority of the value generated in crypto, and that apps would basically make no money in comparison. ... and then we got Hyperliquid & Polymarket and the appchain meta. The AI equivalent of that is the "Fat model thesis". AI labs bought into the idea that models serving as neutral infrastructure, providing tokens to the app layer, would capture a majority of the value. But then they realized that Chinese labs could just distill their models and get 95% performance for 1% of the training cost, and that real value was in owning the customer's workflow You can already see them changing course. - you can't use your Claude/Chatgpt subscription in third party apps - the API prices have risen tenfold but the subscription price remain the same - most new AI tools don't let you plug in models from different vendors anymore In a sense they are pivoting to the appchain thesis, where one vendor controls the entire stack from infra to customer facing app