Intelligence "Too Cheap to Meter"

 

 

Feel free to agree or disagree with anything in this video, but "abundance" has been a Hallmark feature of computing, bandwidth, the internet and digital content. Decades ago, pondering the future of nuclear energy, a widely-heard phrase was "energy too cheap to meter." In other words, the cost of billing would be more than the cost of the product sold.

So now you might start to hear about "intelligence too cheap to meter." That might, or might not, happen, just as nuclear power never produced electricity so abundantly, at such low costs, that it ever made sense not to meter its use. 

On the other hand, most important computing innovations do involve the creation of scenarios where the use of computing cycles, inferences and storage become so affordable we no longer really worry about the cost of using resources to create inferences. 

I've always referred to this as "near zero pricing," where the constraint of using the resources was low enough that they ceased to be hurdles or obstacles to doing things with them. 

AI does not actually have to become so affordable it's cost is effectively "zero." It only has to be affordable enough that nobody really worries about using it.