Will AI model labs end up as low-margin commodity infrastructure?

Benedict Evans published a carefully argued piece this week on where token pricing eventually settles. His argument: every structural dynamic currently visible points toward foundation models becoming low-margin commodity infrastructure, with value captured further up the stack by whoever builds the applications on top. The mobile data parallel is instructive: two decades of explosive usage growth, a trillion-dollar industry, and telco stocks that went nowhere. The question we are answering with our clients is always "where in our business model does the real value sit?" The infrastructure layer rarely wins. The application layer (the workflows, the proprietary data, the trust built around them) almost always does.