Big tech funds startups (through obfuscated legal and financial means) and that funding goes straight back into big tech cloud hosting and SaaS services.
AI is the perfect tool for enshittification, because it can get you 80% of a finished product with a fraction of the costs it used to take, but the last 20% takes 2-5x times longer. So you just ignore the last 20%, make it up in volume by producing 100 mediocre products instead of 1 great one.
And that’s basically the state of the tech industry right now. I don’t think it’ll be like this forever, I think there will be better ways to collaborate with AI rather than wholesale delegation and prompting. But for now we’re stuck with mass enshittifation. People who have no sense of quality, taste, or craftsmanship don’t even understand, they skim over some generic blog post from Claude that takes five paragraphs to say one thing or watch the Coca Cola AI ad and don’t event notice it’s a different train in every shot and they think it’s so amazing. I hope this isn’t just the way things are now.