Patrick Collison with Amjad Masad on why AI will be like food: essential to everything, and still not where most of the value goes. Amjad: "There's also this trend of saying that the foundation lab companies are gonna be able to capture a big part of at least new business creation, but perhaps the economy. It's like there's no reason to compete with ChatGPT or Claude because they're just gonna roll over us." Patrick: "Without food, there really would not be much economy or humanity. It is a truly necessary ingredient in production. And yet, most of the economy is not captured by food producers." "The idea that AI is going to be hugely important and abundant in the future does not necessarily mean that all the value is gonna be captured by these AI labs." "The value of any company is in proportion to what its customers can pay it. And so if there's one company in the economy, that's in fact not a very valuable company... Prices and value accrue to that which is scarce." "I think it would be a terrible reason not to start a company because you think that... any given company or sector will gobble everything up. That's not how things have worked through history." Full conversation: @patrickc @stripe @amasad @Replit