Selling tokens is a similar approach to social media "engagement" loops of keeping people in their app. It works but the detractor for frontier labs is no ad revenue.
I think you should read up on Xerox and PARC. A single company can only take on so many things at once and be successful. Also it was ~60 years ago so at that time they could only manage the IP of laser printers as it aligned with the copier business. They didn't productize GUI, Ethernet, and other inventions or concepts like tablet computing that came out of PARC.
Now there are conglomerates like Alphabet that have Waymo, YouTube, etc. very different businesses, thats a bit different. It might actually make business sense for the frontier labs to do something like a CRM system as a spun-off separate company. That might be in direct competition with their source of capital and probably would violate some agreement - if they have a non-compete type of setup with the likes of Oracle, Google, Microsoft.
I think you should read up on Xerox and PARC. A single company can only take on so many things at once and be successful. Also it was ~60 years ago so at that time they could only manage the IP of laser printers as it aligned with the copier business. They didn't productize GUI, Ethernet, and other inventions or concepts like tablet computing that came out of PARC.
Now there are conglomerates like Alphabet that have Waymo, YouTube, etc. very different businesses, thats a bit different. It might actually make business sense for the frontier labs to do something like a CRM system as a spun-off separate company. That might be in direct competition with their source of capital and probably would violate some agreement - if they have a non-compete type of setup with the likes of Oracle, Google, Microsoft.