Money, Control, and Decentralization

What tech giants are chasing is not revenue, but control over models, narratives, and ideas.

Written by: The Smart Ape

Translated by: AididiaoJP, Foresight News

I often hear people say: "Big tech companies are just chasing profits." Clearly, those who say this don’t understand anything.

The deeper truth is that these giants are not after revenue, but control over models, narratives, and ideas.

Bernard Arnault, one of the richest people in the world, once said:

"I now sleep better with $2 billions in debt than I did when I owed $50,000."

For them, money itself is not the goal, but a tool.

If a company loses money every year but gains direct control over its users—including their choices, values, and beliefs—then it is not a failure at all. It profits richly from the only thing that truly matters: "control."

The Mirage of Money

We are the only ones who still see money as the ultimate goal.

But at a higher level, money is just a tool. More precisely, it is a tool of control.

Money hasn’t always played this role. In its early forms, it was merely a means of transaction, used to exchange fruits, vegetables, and goods.

Then came salt and spices, which were easier to trade.

Later, precious metals, silver coins, and gold coins, which had real value due to their rarity and utility.

Until then, money represented real value.

But then we shifted to paper money, which has no intrinsic value; and later to something even more abstract: digital currency, data on a screen, which can be printed infinitely with a click.

This latest form allows those who control its creation to acquire real resources for free, such as water, food, land, and now even time and human thought.

So when a company loses money on paper but gains your attention, your mind, and your behavior, it loses nothing. It is exchanging fake money for real human resources.

Data Shows Control, Not Just Profits

To be honest, the numbers behind OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are insane.

But what’s even crazier is that if the goal is profit, these numbers make no sense; they only make sense if the goal is domination.

OpenAI generated about $4.3 billions in revenue in the first half of 2025, with an annualized run rate of $10 billions. Sounds profitable to you?

But it burned $2.5 billions in the same period. For every dollar it earns, it spends $1.6.

It also raised an additional $8.3 billions in capital, possibly expanding to $40 billions. Investors know it’s not profitable, but they don’t care. Why?

Because the goal is not short-term returns, but to lock the world’s AI layer within OpenAI’s ecosystem.

OpenAI even signed a multi-billion dollar deal with AMD, not just to buy chips, but to secure a long-term supply of GPUs, even acquiring up to 10% of AMD’s equity. That’s vertical domination, controlling the raw computing power all future AI will depend on.

Take AI as an example, only three or four companies completely dominate model training.

Building these models requires hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in computing power and data.

Smaller players can’t compete, which gives these giants disproportionate influence over how every AI "thinks" and "speaks."

@MTorygreen calls this the AI monoculture:

"When everyone uses the same handful of models, online content converges to the same tone, style, and perspective."

Besides filtering out diversity, this system also creates a single way of thinking.

It feels as if they don’t want people to think for themselves, to have personal ideas or independent insights.

They want you to follow the narrative, like obedient sheep.

When you control the model, you control which voices are amplified, which disappear, and which ideas become "truth."

You don’t even need to ban speech; many viewpoints never appear at all, because datasets and model filters erase them before they are born.

How Technology Shapes What We See, Think, and Believe

Because most digital services rely on the same few models, the entire online conversation becomes homogenized.

Tone, arguments, and even what is "acceptable" begin to align with the values coded by these companies.

If a model is optimized for "safety," "risk aversion," or "political correctness," then dissenting voices or unconventional tones are softened, sanitized, or completely deleted.

This is soft censorship by design.

Tory Green explained it perfectly: we no longer interact with a chaotic, wild internet, but with

"an echo chamber reverberating with corporate-approved replies."

Small developers trying to introduce new languages, minority perspectives, or cultural nuances have no chance—they can’t access the same computing power, data, or financial resources.

In short, they can’t access the infinitely printed fake money.

The world we end up in is not a world of many ideas, but a world of many mirrors reflecting the same idea.

The Only Way Out Is Decentralized AI

If the problem is centralized control of models, computing power, and data, then the solution must reverse it.

The only way out is decentralization—including decentralized computing power, models, and governance.

Imagine a GPU network distributed among thousands of contributors, instead of being controlled by any single cloud or company.

Projects like @ionet are already building this vision, with communities sharing computing resources for independent developers to use.

Instead of relying on a giant’s "one model to rule them all," every community, culture, and language can train its own models, reflecting its values and worldview.

Tory Green advocates exactly this: thousands of unique, community-driven models instead of a single AI monoculture.

These community models will be transparent, auditable, and governed by users themselves, so bias and censorship cannot hide in corporate black boxes.

Of course, this is not easy. Competing with these giants requires access to the same resources, and without the backing of infinite capital, it’s almost impossible.

But there is another force: collective awakening.

If enough people understand what’s at stake and unite their real resources, energy, creativity, and collaborative spirit, they can build something greater than money.

It’s hard, yes. But it’s necessary.

Because if we don’t, the system will only get worse, draining more and more real resources from the world.

We’ve reached a point where even our free will and imagination are being drained.

If we don’t fight back now, what resource will they take next?