Agreed that LLMs don't become extractive on their own. Companies just choose that path when opacity is more profitable than usefulness.

Yeah. I definitely think LLMs are cool and are useful — they don't just appear that way because everything else happened to be enshittified when they came on the scene — but I've definitely been pondering the fact that we're likely in a part of the cycle right before enshittification sets in. Because it is very possible to monetize AI — the badness of the token economics has been greatly exaggerated, and with huge MAU numbers there's a lot of opportunity — but most of those MAUs won't pay a monthly subscription with caps and rate limits like prosumers will, so the obvious way to monetize is with ads and manipulation.