AI wrapper companies won't be able to charge value-based pricing.

· Bits and Bobs 7/6/26
  • AI wrapper companies won't be able to charge value-based pricing.
    • "This would have taken 2 hours of human labor to achieve before, we'll charge you 30% of that."
    • But the vast majority of the value comes from the model, so the domain-specific wrapper on top can't charge for that value.
      • If they did, a new entrant will pop up that charges less for the wrapper on top.
    • The model is so much more powerful than any domain-specific wrapper, that it dwarfs the wrapper.
      • A customer could say "I could just do this myself with Claude Code… what proprietary value are you offering?"
    • But even the models can't charge the labor replacement costs, if there are competitors willing to give equivalent value for less.
    • China is using Open Weight models as "spoilers" to make it harder for the frontier labs to recoup their investments.
    • Everybody but OpenAI and Anthropic benefit.

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