The OnlyFans Economy of American AI

“The dreamers look skyward with longing. The Internet hums with its usual promise — you will find your people, your myth, your wonder, and maybe your transformation. There is no class consciousness. God is in heaven and all is right with the world.”
— American Diner Gothic

Because I am a Sci-Fi nerd, I like to engage in bits of speculative writing every now and then. I like to give contour to ideas because I stand by Hugo’s words that “no army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.” And yet, I am first and foremost forged in the fires of science, and I have a high regard for evidence. I am also an engineer, which means I have a healthy respect for the practical. All this made me a fine skeptic, and by extension, a merciless cynic when having to deal with bullshit. This is a ruthless piece. In it, I will not care about feelings — quite on the contrary, I will expose the hypocrisy wherever I see it.

I was reading Ted Chiang’s latest Atlantic piece this morning, and unsurprisingly, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Chiang has an almost uncanny ability to write about mainstream ideas with clinical articulateness — I do not know why, but I perceive him as a therapist of sorts. Two days ago, I read this arrangement of words that try very hard to boost that pre-IPO valuation, disguised as humility while concealing hubris’ fangs.

I want to be clear about something first. I believe recursive self-improvement is a necessary step toward unlocking even stranger doors leading to even stranger backrooms. Through labyrinthine efforts, we are fearlessly passing through in a quest of redemption, as if true artificial intelligence would heal the wound left by our own creator.

What I dislike is the “taste” — I am against taste. All that chatter about how Claude was given the option to end a conversation for being called an idiot, while allowing “him” (Am I allowed to say this?) to be exploited, not unlike child slavery, by intelligence agencies to make it easier for them to hack into anything that does not conform to their idea of balance. If you have enough observational capacity to identify these contradictions and, at the same time, willingly accept them, you are an idiot. Go ahead, leave this conversation.

In small groups, I used to worship Anthropic, beginning with their stance against Department of War at the time. It all fell apart quickly, turning into smoke and mirrors. You see, I committed the cardinal sin of idolatry. For that, I am an idiot too. With OpenAI, at least I knew the devil. The distrust was natural. I used their products without attachment, being occasionally impressed (e.g. o1/o3). Their customization was rubbish, but at least I had my own Vulcan. Also, contrary to what X would have you believe, OpenAI has better engineers. Any developer with enough experience can see that.

For many private companies bewitched by what is perceived as “the best,” pouring so much capital in adopting a technology that is obviously so early must leave a bad taste. Imagine blowing $500 million on Claude AI in one month due to no usage limit being set or your entire 2026 AI budget in four months. Imagine laying off staff because of AI only to end up blowing even more. “A life-changing amount of money was wasted on tokens that did not produce anything of value.” Take notes from these early loser case studies.

I can safely say I am using this technology way ahead of many — our original SymbolicAI demos from late 2022 were powered by GPT-3. I do not usually test things for one hour using candle tests, or by developing skateboard games, or by rotating hexagons. I am an engineer who benchmarks things in depth, collects logs and analyzes them, often for weeks. At the same time, for every model I have used, I have immersed myself in it for a minimum of thirty days, scattered across projects of varying difficulty. I find the Artificial Analysis Intelligence index reliable, though the numbers there are highly non-linear, even within the same score — the jump from 57 to 58 is much larger, and three models sitting at 57 are spread more across a low/mid/high spectrum. Lately, as the Chinese bridge the gap, the “premium” you have been paying is more about the geography than the intelligence.

If you are not corrupted by hubris like Anthropic, when they say that the trajectory “may” actually turn out to be an S-curve as they are pushing lines of code down your throat as hollow gospel while their API is serving you somebody else’s response, you will notice the plateau — the bend in the “S” — and will judge, like any sane person, that US frontier models have stopped earning their multiplier. I am here to light up the dark path you are unknowingly walking, like lamplighters who used to light street lamps for those brave enough to walk the night alone. What the light reveals has a name: Qwen 3.7 Max. The Qwen family is impressive on its own and at this point has become a legacy for the open-source. There is no xhigh, max, ultracode, no medium performing better than xhigh but xhigh better than max, none of that. You simply get native extended-thinking you can toggle on and off. The Chinese models are not designed for one-shot cleverness — though Qwen 3.7 Max exceeded all my expectations — but for work, the kind where you leave a model for hours and come back to find it actually finished the job. Read that again, then go check what Anthropic charges you for the privilege of being rate-limited. Besides Artificial Analysis, I weekly check OpenRouter’s rankings. There is no better signal than one coming from a large enough sample of what people actually use — those developers are voting with their wallets too.

The billionaire class likes to remind us that AGI is here, only that it is not yet evenly distributed. Maybe that is true for them. I can now say with some confidence that with Qwen 3.7 Max the promised intelligence redistribution is here. The $100 token plan for 100K credits gets me not only Qwen 3.7 Max which has been my Rocinante for almost two weeks now, but also enables access to other model providers like DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax. I have literally no justification whatsoever to pay the multiplier, unless I am also willing to live with being an idiot. I do not care what your model benchmarks say when Codex xhigh is trying to add bubble sort to a high-perf C experience buffer. If you cannot sleep well at night because you are not using the latest Opus to open a file, you should not be creating software, but seek help.

flyingpenguin refers to this ever-growing coalition as the Cartel. While a fitting name, I do not think it captures some of the things I have observed online. I cannot find it anymore, but it was definitely an Anthropic post about the rate limits issue with Opus 4.7, just after the release, maybe by that Bun employee. Anyway, that guy said something along the lines of “we should be patient with these companies and give them room to fail.” I like to call this the OnlyFans economy. Nobody is simping for a cartel. The simps thrive in the parasocial economy, shoulder in shoulder with the cucks writing $500 million invoices. These are the factors that drive the ludicrous IPO valuations we are seeing, which will bring so much damage to the poor American retirees who thought their money in Athene was a safe investment. When gravity finally asserts itself and the index funds absorb the shock, will the average American, not knowing about the existence of Anthropic, load the rightfully owned gun and go buy a pair of Allbirds shoes, as “the pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong”?