In-housing: Google terminated its major annotation contractor and internalized rater capacity; Meta's $14.3 billion stake in Scale AI prompted Google, OpenAI, and xAI to pull their work — a hard ceiling on commodity-labeling margins, though it never touches the toll-booth owners. The capex/revenue disconnect everyone debates upstream has a mirror down here: the "picks-and-shovels" data layer is mostly rented land, and the landlords are evicting the tenants. Value keeps retreating up the gradient toward what can't be substituted, in-housed, or fair-used.
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