Emad on falling behind, Salim on intelligence as infrastructure, Dave on "too cheap to meter"

Yeah, for sure. Emad, you've thought through the economy — uh, an AI token economy like this, loyalty points —

Uh, well, I mean, it's increased capabilities, increased access. Let's put it this way: the average Chinese person and their AI will be smarter than the average American and their AI. The average Chinese person and their robot will have more manual capability than the average American. And so Americans are going to be left behind. Europeans are going to be left behind unless we get our heads out of our butts and actually [embrace] technology.

Change our mindset, right? Change our mindset.

Do you want to be stupider than the Chinese? That's actually the question.

I think the other way to build on — Emad, what you just said — is intelligence is becoming infrastructure, right? And you need to kind of focus it in at that level. It's becoming a foundational layer and you need to just accept that and move forward with that paradigm.

I really want to push back too on this "too cheap to meter," you know, comment which has come up a lot. You know, is electricity too cheap to meter? No, obviously not. It's expensive. AI is the same thing. Like, it doesn't matter — we're driving down the cost by 100x to a million-x for sure. But what you can do with 5,000, 500,000 or 5 million agents is mind-blowing. It's skyrocketing, you know, and so I don't think people are going to want less agents. They're going to want many, many, many more. And so the budgets are going to be real.

So if someone gives you free tokens, free compute, free opportunity, you should grab it and savor it because it gives you a chance to get on the map and get ahead. But I don't think too cheap to meter is ever going to happen. I think the use cases go to infinity at the same rate that the costs come down.

Fascinating. Alex, your thoughts?

I have to point to the elephant in the room, which is there was the old kind of tokens that we're not talking about here that is essentially irrelevant in China, which is crypto tokens. So we find ourselves in a future where the tokens at issue are ones that embody individual units of superintelligence and have nothing to do with sort of zero-sum financial exchange.

I think we're on a trajectory, and I think China is the bellwether — for better or for worse is the bellwether here — for universal basic compute or universal basic capability. Right now it starts in China with credit card reward points; you get AI tokens in the not too perhaps distant future. Maybe we start to see token socialism, where the party, in the case of China, or you know some western — not quite analog, that's too strong, hopefully — uh, but you know, the equivalent instruments of state power are starting to issue, whether it's via credit card points or whether it's via welfare or whether it's via some other mechanism, a redistribution — tokens, UBT — a redistribution of superintelligence tokens. I think we're starting to see the very beginning of that in China, but I think that's going to blanket all of humanity.