What if a megacap bundles a frontier model into apps for free?
A megacap bundling a frontier model free into consumer apps undercuts standalone AI-subscription revenue, a mild risk-off nick to Nvidia and high-beta crypto. Rhymes with Google bundling free Gemini into Search/Workspace to blunt OpenAI's subscription wedge (2024-25). Skeptic's note: commoditizing the model layer raises, not lowers, underlying inference compute — bearish for pure-play AI app revenue, neutral-to-bullish for the silicon; the small move is correct.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 0–6 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. A megacap bundles a frontier model free into consumer apps, undercutting standalone AI-subscription revenue. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — AI capex ▼ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.