Do you remember when Uber and Lyft first came to your area?

For me, it was junior year of college. Uber did this crazy promotion where they gave you 10 free rides for up to $250. The next week, Lyft came in and matched the promotion, so you got another 10 free rides from them. After that, both apps offered incredible promos that brought most rides down to just a dollar or two. The driver incentives were generous as well due to the competition, so you could find a ride within minutes. For several weeks everyone I knew was ubering everywhere: to classes, to parties, to the gym, heck, two blocks over if they could. The service was amazing, and it transformed campus immediately. It was cheap, and it was awesome.

I feel this way about AI today.

If you put your ego aside, it's so obvious that we are living through the proliferation of a great technology. And this time, thanks to abundant competition, the value is actually accruing to the consumer!

For less than a dollar in tokens[1], I can:

• Debug a SELECT FOR UPDATE deadlock issue in my database
• Transpose every song I know how to play on guitar into a new key
• Build an astrology profile web app for my newborn baby
• Learn the physics of how an espresso machine works
• Analyze my portfolio of stock investments to find correlations and tail risks
• Find words that exist in Hindi but not in English and vice versa

Unlike the Uber/Lyft situation, where we sacrificed the cheap but kept the awesome[2], this one actually feels…sustainable? Models are getting smarter, faster, and more open. The hardware they run on is getting aggressively deployed all over the world. The brightest and most ambitious builders are working nonstop to push this trend forward. And the competition is ruthless, with frontier labs barely eking out the open source.

It's so wildly generous that I find it hard to believe that anyone can be making a ton of money on this right now. I guess the pie just grows by that much?

I'm not even talking about the AGI future of curing all disease and humanoid robots folding my laundry. If everything stopped right where we are today, it would still be amazing. But the date on this post is quite important, and maybe we will laugh at how trivial the tasks on the list look in a year.

Either way, as a consumer, technologist, and engineer I'm having a really fun time.

So thank you. Thank you to all the people working hard to bring this technology to life.