AI Is Oil, Not God

Author: Packy McCormick (Not Boring) URL: https://www.notboring.co/p/ai-is-oil-not-god One-line: The open-weights letter signed by Nvidia, Microsoft, and others is classic commoditize-your-complements strategy — and the fact that the people closest to the frontier are pro-diffusion is itself evidence that AI is an economic commodity rather than an emerging deity.

[PARTIAL] This capture is the free email preview only. The post is paywalled at the point where McCormick shares his reply to Matt Kaufman’s safety objection — the reply itself, and the footnotes he mentions adding, are behind “Keep reading with a 7-day free trial” and are NOT in this capture.

Key claims

• The open-weights letter is a strategy move, not an ideological one. Satya Nadella and Jensen Huang, among other tech leaders, signed and shared a letter in support of open-weight models on July 24, 2026. McCormick’s read: “this was Capitalism at its best.”
• Every signatory sells a complement to open models. The piece runs the list explicitly: models run on Nvidia chips; they power Microsoft products; a16z and Y Combinator back companies that use and compete with models; Palantir’s Alex Karp wants to disintermediate models in the enterprise; Meta (Company) is more open source than peer American labs; Hugging Face is “where open models live”; Dell sells the machines; CrowdStrike benefits if defenders have the same intelligence as attackers; Box (Company), ServiceNow, Replit and Perplexity all improve as capable models get cheaper.
• The mechanism is Commoditizing Complements, invoked directly via Joel Spolsky’s Strategy Letter V.
• The competitive target is a frontier duopoly. “The more competition there is at the model layer, the less Anthropic and OpenAI are able to run away with the frontier and build a duopoly, the more each of the signatories benefits.”
• The central frame is Oil vs. God. Whether you favor open weights comes down to whether AI is “an economically useful commodity that can be scaled and refined to act as a multiplier on everything we do” or “supremely intelligent and powerful being that’s going to wake up and make humanity subservient.” McCormick has been on the Oil side since The Goldilocks Zone (June 2024) and says his belief is unchanged.
• Insider behavior is offered as evidence for the Oil view. Satya and Jensen sit at the bleeding edge; if they believed models were about to become conscious, McCormick argues, they wouldn’t be so openly pro-diffusion even given short-term incentives.
• The strongest counterargument in the piece is not McCormick’s. Matt Kaufman of Collaborative Fund emailed the objection: open weights can be fine-tuned to strip bio/cyber safeguards, LLMs may favor offense over defense, and that logic points toward regulating them like weapons.

Notable quotes

“Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements.” — Joel Spolsky, Strategy Letter V

“Capitalism is just so beautiful. $8 trillion worth of market cap coming out in support of open-weight models because it’s good for their business and makes them look good… and, totally coincidentally, it also happens to be better for us consumers and practically every—” — McCormick’s own tweet, quoted in the piece (truncated in the email capture)

“Signing this letter is a selfish act that also happens to align with the interests of consumers and millions of businesses. And that’s great! That’s capitalism, baby!”

“I think it comes down to whether you think AI is more Oil or God, more ‘an economically useful commodity that can be scaled and refined to act as a multiplier on everything we do’ or ‘supremely intelligent and powerful being that’s going to wake up and make humanity subservient (if we’re lucky).’”

“Surely, if they saw something that made them believe that these models were going to become conscious and take over the world, they wouldn’t be as openly pro-diffusion, even if they were short-term incentivized to be. I think they know that AI is Oil, too.”

“I’d definitely prefer a more open ecosystem were it not for risks like models being fine-tuned to remove bio / cyber safeguards, and then resulting in harm. This seems trivially easy and perhaps isn’t a big issue now, but likely will be once 1) the open ones are much more powerful and 2) dangerous actors outside our tech bubble catch on to the capabilities here.” — Matt Kaufman, Collaborative Fund

How it connects

• Packy McCormick — third of his essays Kyle has annotated as a long read, alongside The AppetiZIRP and The Enchanted Notebook.
• America’s Open-Model Paradox — the same open-weights policy question from a different angle; read alongside this one.
• Another Open Source AI Debate — prior long read on the open-model argument.
• Commoditizing Complements — the strategic mechanism the whole piece rests on.
• Open Source — open weights as the AI-era instance of the open-source argument.
• Precautionary Principle — McCormick frames the letter as a fight against it; the Kaufman objection is the principle stated in its strongest form.
• Open-Source Knowledge — Kyle’s essay on the knowledge layer forming around investing; Not Boring is a running example.