As one industry leader stated: “There is a view of the world which says the terminal value of this business is zero. We just don’t know when that terminal value hits.” Appen’s collapse from $4.5B to $140M market cap is exhibit A — commodity tagging is already being displaced by LLMs. But the market is bifurcating, not dying. Scale AI reached $29B valuation because structured expert judgment is a different product entirely: human judgment trains AI, AI automates work, automation frees human time, that time produces new judgment data — a reinforcing flywheel.
The bear case misses that new modalities keep restarting the data hunger cycle — text may approach saturation, but video, audio, and world models are early. This mirrors Technology transitions create more of the 'dying' thing, not less: the “dying” thing (human annotation) grows in aggregate even as its commodity layer shrinks. The bifurcation validates LLMs selectively destroy vertical software moats — 5 fall, 5 hold applied to services: commoditized layers fall while expert judgment, proprietary data, and platform infrastructure hold.