What if an open-weights near-AGI release collapses the proprietary moat?
An open-weights near-AGI release is bullish hardware even as it kills the model moat: cheap, ubiquitous inference plus a humanoid/edge-AI pull lifts NVDA, the semi complex and Tesla (Optimus), with a faint disinflationary tag on breakevens. Rhymes with the Jan-2025 DeepSeek episode - which paradoxically proved efficient open models expand total compute demand (Jevons) after the initial NVDA scare. Forward angle: value migrates from model labs to silicon, power and applications; short the proprietary-API premium, own the picks-and-shovels.
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 1–3 years 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-on shock. An open-weights near-AGI release collapses the proprietary-AI moat. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — AI capex ▲ · Robotics productivity ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.