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It has been said that AI is the new oil, the new electricity, and the new internet. And the once nimble and highly profitable software companies (MSFT, GOOG, ...) became like utilities, investing in nuclear energy, among other things, to run AI data centres. Open Source and the #DeepSeek #Sputnik have once again shown that such companies "have no moat" in the field of AI. In many talks over the last decade, I mentioned the rich guy I knew when I was young. He had a Porsche with something incredible: a mobile phone. He could call other people who had such a Porsche via a satellite. But 40 years later, everyone had a cheap smartphone in their pocket, which is far superior to what he had in his Porsche. And it's the same with AI. Every five years, compute becomes ten times cheaper - a trend that has continued since the first general-purpose computer was completed in 1941. The basic techniques of modern AI were developed in the last millennium, when compute was still very expensive, but this trend has made them so cheap that AI has been on your smartphone since the 2010s. The trend will not break in the coming decades (the physical Bremermann limit is still a long way off). An AI data centre that is worth 100 billion today will only be worth 1 billion in ten years' time. Soon, small, cheap computers with increasingly efficient open source AI software will do what the large data centres do today. So AI will not be controlled by a few big AI utilities. No, everyone will own cheap but powerful and transparent AI that improves their lives in many ways. See the old motto of @nnaisense founded in 2014: ‘AI∀’ or ‘AI For All’.
