Well, reverse-engineers could have done this before, but you didn't pay one $3,000 to do it. You paid Claude $30 or whatever to do it. So all that changed was the cost, and the bar is now a lot higher to make a product people will pay for. Furthermore, no one signaled to the market that there was value there, so no one in China reverse-engineered it for $30 before AI. Makes me wonder if these "award-winning" algorithms are valuable due to prestige alone.