> Providers are going to eat every abstraction along the way in their delivery of intelligent capabilities. [...] There's a lot of talk around economics. What is going to be more economic than a provider building abstractions/margin-optimizations around the tokens, and shipping directly to consumer. Vs token arbitrage.

The strongman counter-argument would be that specialized interfaces to AI will always require substantial amounts of work to create and maintain.

If true, then similar to Microsoft, it might make more financial sense for Anthropic et al. to cede those specialized markets to others, focus on their core platform product, take a cut from many different specialized products, and end up making more as the addressable market broadens.

The major AI model providers substantially investing in specialized interfaces would suggest they're pessimistic about revolutionary core model improvements and are thus looking to vertically integration to preserve margin / moat.

But relatively speaking, it doesn't seem like interfaces are being inordinately invested in, and coding seems such an obvious agentic target (and dogfoodable learning opportunity!) that it shouldn't prompt tea leaf reading.