The future of AI is boring

Intelligence gets priced like electricity. The only question left is who owns the power station.

In ten years, intelligence will be priced like electricity. You'll pay for it by the unit, it'll be cheap, and it'll be boring.

The interesting question isn't whether AI gets smarter. It will. The question is who owns it.

The price only goes one way

Every year, the same level of capability costs about a tenth of what it did the year before. A task that once needed the biggest model in a datacenter moves to a smaller model on rented hardware, and eventually to one small enough to run on your laptop.

Open weights trail the best closed models by months, not years. Whatever the best models can do today, you'll be able to download and run yourself not long after.

When something gets that cheap that fast, it stops being a product and becomes a commodity. Nobody brags about their electricity.

The model isn't the moat

If models commoditise, what's left?

  • Compute. Intelligence is FLOPS turned into answers. Whoever has the cheapest FLOPS has the cheapest intelligence.
  • Data. The kind you can't scrape: from your own users, your own sensors, your own mistakes.
  • Taste. Knowing which of a thousand generated answers to keep.

A company whose only edge is a slightly better model is on a deadline: its lead lasts until an open model catches up. Unless catching up becomes illegal.

Doom sells

In May 2023, the heads of OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic signed a one-sentence statement: the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority, alongside pandemics and nuclear war. The same month, OpenAI's CEO told the US Senate that models above a certain level of capability should need a government licence.

Then they all went back to building them.

Maybe they mean it. It doesn't matter. Look at what the fear buys.

It sells the product. Nobody pays a premium for a commodity, but a model that might end the world is the most important thing you could ever invest in. Doom is how you keep AI from being boring.

And it writes the rules. If AI is a weapon, only licensed labs should be allowed to build it, and the labs asking for licences are the ones who'd get them. Open weights become the dangerous thing, and the deadline goes away.

George Hotz made the opposite case when he debated Eliezer Yudkowsky in 2023. The defence against powerful AI isn't keeping it in a few hands. It's putting it in everyone's.

What I actually worry about

It isn't a model waking up with its own plans. It's that the few companies with the most compute end up running the thinking for everyone else, and everyone else rents it.

When you rent your thinking, someone else decides what it's allowed to think about, what it costs next year, and whether you get to keep using it. That's a lot of power in very few places, and nothing from science fiction has to happen for it to go badly.

The answer to that isn't rules that lock the current leaders in. It's making sure anyone can own and run their own models.

Own your compute

This is already more possible than people think. A laptop can transcribe a lecture and run a useful language model today. The speed limit is set by memory bandwidth, and bandwidth per dollar only goes up.

Every year, bigger models fit on your own machine. The future I want is one where that keeps happening until you don't need anyone else's.

Renting will stay cheaper. A datacenter reads the weights once and uses them for hundreds of people at the same time. Your laptop reads them for you alone. Power from the grid is cheaper than running your own generator, too.

That's fine. You don't have to run your own. You have to be able to. The option to leave is what keeps the rent fair.

If you can't run it, you don't own it.

What that means for me

If every layer of AI turns into a commodity, the people who matter are the ones who understand all of them — from the matrix multiply at the bottom to the product someone uses at the top.

So that's what I'm trying to learn. Not one framework. The whole stack, down far enough that when the tools change, I don't have to start over.

I might be wrong

Maybe the biggest models win outright and stay so far ahead that nothing you can own ever catches up. Then the future is a few enormous datacenters, and the rest of us are customers.

I don't think so. Every computing wave so far started centralised and ended up in your pocket. I'd bet on this one doing the same.

A boring future: intelligence as cheap as electricity, and a generator in every house.

Sources

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