Something interesting is happening in the way smart people talk about AI infrastructure.
For the past two years, the conversation was about models — which one is biggest, which one writes the best code, which one will reach AGI first. That conversation hasn't gone away, but at recent AI infrastructure summits a different framing has been quietly taking over. Industry experts and academic researchers have started describing the token economy as a three-layer stack, not unlike the way we eventually came to think about cloud computing.
The framing goes like this:
Layer 1 — Producers. The model labs that actually train and serve frontier LLMs.
Layer 2 — Aggregators. The middleware that normalizes APIs, pools capacity, and bills users.
