Surface

Jasper, Grammarly, Copilot in Word: Same Category, Three Structural Fates

All three help you write. Jasper owned only the surface (L7c) and dissolved when the model went free. Grammarly owned distribution (L4a + L7c embedded copilot) into every browser and editor, until a bigger L4a owner, Microsoft, integrated the model directly into Word, Outlook, and Teams. Same layer. Bigger railroad. The market is repricing layer ownership, not ARR.

Chegg: From $12B to 99% Collapse, The Fastest Value Destruction in EdTech

Chegg sat at L7b, generic educational content with no proprietary data, no memory loops, no compliance moat. When ChatGPT arrived, it didn't compete with Chegg, it made Chegg's entire layer free. The stock dropped 99%. Law III predicted it.

Gamma at $2.1B: The Thin-Layer Graveyard in Real Time

Presentation generation lives at L7b, a single thin slice of the stack. Claude, Copilot, and Gemini now do it for free inside surfaces 100× larger than Gamma's. The Intelligence Cube predicted this before the market priced it in: when your entire product is one prompt away from being free inside an L4 you don't own, the valuation is a liability, not a moat.

Stack Overflow: When Your Community Becomes Training Data

Stack Overflow's traffic dropped roughly 35–50% after ChatGPT shipped. Fifteen years of community-built knowledge, packaged as L7b content and scraped into L2 training sets. The community that built the data captured none of the value; the model layer captured all of it. A textbook case of L1 data mis-packaged as L7 content.