Anthropic and OpenAI both stood up consulting arms this month. GitHub Copilot quietly admitted its subscription pricing never made sense. Vercel published the receipts.
That Vercel stat where 22.2% of requests ending in a tool call but carrying 58.9% of token volume is the whole story. GitHub didn't "wake up" to agentic economics; everyone is discovering at once that the most valuable workloads are also the most expensive to serve, and nobody priced for that. The labs aren't pivoting to consulting because they want to. They're pivoting because token revenue has a footnote and consultant hours don't.
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams joked that philosophers demanded “rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty” once a machine started producing answers. The modern AI panic has created the same economy. Vast numbers of academics, ethicists, and professional critics now make careers denouncing systems they scarcely understand, because alarmism pays better than technical competence and confusion is easier to sell than clarity.
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That Vercel stat where 22.2% of requests ending in a tool call but carrying 58.9% of token volume is the whole story. GitHub didn't "wake up" to agentic economics; everyone is discovering at once that the most valuable workloads are also the most expensive to serve, and nobody priced for that. The labs aren't pivoting to consulting because they want to. They're pivoting because token revenue has a footnote and consultant hours don't.
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams joked that philosophers demanded “rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty” once a machine started producing answers. The modern AI panic has created the same economy. Vast numbers of academics, ethicists, and professional critics now make careers denouncing systems they scarcely understand, because alarmism pays better than technical competence and confusion is easier to sell than clarity.
https://jbsections.substack.com/p/academics-denouncing-aino-technical