The Day the Floor Fell Out

Genmo dropped Mochi 1 today. Apache 2.0. Text to video. 480p now, HD "coming soon" — which, given the pace of this particular week, means sometime before you finish reading this sentence.

This is the one that breaks the business model. Not because it's the best video model — it probably isn't, today — but because it's open, it runs on your hardware, and in eighteen months you'll be generating an hour of HD footage for the cost of a cup of coffee you didn't buy. The economics of every video SaaS that launched in the last two years now look like someone quietly removed the load-bearing wall while the tenants were asleep.

Runway's hard pivot to hardware makes more sense every week. When the software becomes a commodity, you sell the GPU. When the GPU becomes a commodity, you sell something else. The game is always the same — figure out what layer still has margin before everyone else does.

Meanwhile, Anthropic pushed an upgraded Sonnet that can use computers. Click things. Type things. Navigate a browser like a person who has somewhere to be. You give it a task and it sits down at a desk that doesn't exist and gets to work.

The phrase "wild day" doesn't quite cover it, but it's the correct instinct.

What's striking is how routine this has started to feel — not because it isn't extraordinary, but because the extraordinary has been arriving on a schedule. Every few weeks the floor drops another few inches and everyone takes a moment to register the new altitude before going back to whatever they were doing. The adjustment period keeps shrinking.

Video generation, three years ago, was a research demo. Two years ago it was impressive garbage. One year ago it was useful garbage. Now it's Apache-licensed and running on your machine, and the only question is how many subscription businesses are currently in the process of becoming worthless without knowing it yet.

The answer is a lot. The answer is always a lot.