Source: Ben Evans
Benedict Evans identifies a structural shift in AI's market hierarchy: as token supply constraints ease, the competitive advantage of owning a frontier model (GPT-4, Claude, Gemini) erodes, pushing value upstream to whoever controls the data, distribution, or user workflows that sit atop these interchangeable capabilities. This mirrors the cloud infrastructure pattern—AWS didn't stay valuable because it owned compute, but because it became the assumed substrate that enabled a thousand applications. The advantage goes to whoever integrates these models into product (OpenAI's play with ChatGPT Plus and enterprise wrappers) or controls data sets for retraining or fine-tuning.