I keep looking at @OpenGradient t's Model Hub as a test of whether AI models can behave like actual products instead of locked-away IP. The part that interests me is not the inference speed, but the structure underneath it: a builder publishes a model, sets a price, and earns automatically every time someone calls it. Over 2,000 models are already listed. That is closer to an app store with built-in royalties than a typical AI API. What makes this interesting is what it does to the incentive for smaller model builders specifically. Right now, a researcher who fine-tunes something genuinely useful has two options: license it to one buyer for a flat fee, or give it away for reputation and hope it leads somewhere. A standing per-call revenue stream is a third option that didn't really exist before in a clean, automated form. Publish once, get paid continuously without needing a sales relationship with every buyer. But marketplaces built on automatic revenue rarely distribute attention evenly. The same dynamic that plays out on app stores and plugin marketplaces tends to repeat here a handful of models that solve the most common use case capture most of the call volume, while the long tail of niche, highly specialized models gets published and then sits largely unused. Good infrastructure for discovery does not automatically solve that. It just makes the imbalance more visible. That is the part I keep coming back to with $OPG specifically. The token captures value from every paid call settling on Base, which means its health is tied directly to how broadly that call volume is distributed across the model hub not just how high the total volume goes. A network where ten popular models account for most activity looks healthy on a usage chart and fragile underneath it because it depends on a small number of builders staying engaged. So the honest question is this does a pay-per-verified-call model actually create sustainable income for the long tail of smaller AI builders or does it just formalize the same winner-take-most pattern every other marketplace settles ? #opg