A trilogy and a coda

Fact, mechanism, consequence, then correction. How near-frontier open weights turn intelligence into an industrial input, and where the surviving rent goes.

One argument in four movements

The seven essays treat AI capability as a cost curve bearing down on labour. This series turns to the other side of the ledger: the businesses selling that capability. Their pricing rests on a scarcity premium. The series asks how long the premium lasts, what happens to the capital financed against it, and what still earns rent once it is gone.

It runs in a fixed order. Part I establishes the fact. Part II supplies the mechanism. Part III follows the consequence into credit and labour. The coda is not a fourth part. It corrects the first three.

  • The Shortening Half-Life · Part I, Fact

    The Second DeepSeek Moment

    Kimi K3 did not make frontier AI free. It made near-frontier capability downloadable, and that is enough to make the scarcity premium contestable.

  • The Shortening Half-Life · Part II, Mechanism

    The frontier labs are building a product Hetzner will sell like bandwidth

    Open weights create an outside option. Standard endpoints, optimisation and routing can turn it into an industrial input priced by the accepted output.

  • The Shortening Half-Life · Part III, Consequence

    The Margin Call

    Debt sized to scarcity pricing, serviced by contested pricing. Where the gap breaks a lender, the written-down capacity can make labour substitution cheaper, not slower.

  • The Shortening Half-Life · Coda, Correction

    Rent Is Not Conserved

    The surviving rent does not have to land on physical capital. It follows the slowest-decaying complement still binding, splits when several bind, and vanishes when none do.

Why it belongs next to the thesis

If cognition becomes a commodity input, unit cost dominance strengthens, because the cost of the machine side of the comparison keeps falling. The same process that removes the wage premium from cognitive labour removes the scarcity premium from the models. Neither labour nor the model layer keeps the rent. It moves towards whatever stays scarce for longest, which is also where the constraint essay found the only tax base that survives.