The Spork Trick 🥄 of the Big AI Providers: How the Harness Becomes the New Corporate IT

Key Takeaways

• The business model behind it: cheap entry-level access at 100 to 300 dollars a month locks early adopters into teams, until the large enterprise contracts end up running through the API.
• Licence chaos as a symptom: quotas change weekly, power users are throttled automatically, and service levels are hard to plan around.
• The case for decentralisation: your own on-premise architecture, frozen models for stable use cases, and the frontier model reduced to a dispatcher.
• China by comparison: less brute force, more smart force, plus an open-source scene that gets more out of less compute.
• The bottom line: harnessing is ultimately a make-or-buy decision.