Notes from Token Town: Negotiating for the Fortune 5 Million (11 minute read)

Frontier labs are continuing to build first-party products on top of their own capabilities. For every token they sell, they can spend it themselves for COGs of under 50%. Your supplier is also your competitor, and they have a permanent cost advantage over you. Applied AI companies need to win on something other than tokens. Businesses need to build products so good that the token itself becomes the commodity input, not the value proposition.