For most of human history, intelligence has been scarce. Not intelligence in the biological sense - people have always been clever - but usable intelligence. The kind that helps you design a system, debug a problem, write code, plan a strategy, analyse data, or turn a vague idea into something real.

That kind of intelligence has always been expensive. You hired it, studied for years to acquire it, or waited for an expert to have time for you. Companies paid consultants, specialists, analysts, engineers, and researchers because complex thinking historically required humans who spent decades learning their craft.

But something extraordinary is happening right now.

For the first time in history, intelligence itself has become something you can purchase on demand. And the price is collapsing. Research from Epoch AI and Stanford’s AI Index shows that the cost of running a given level of model capability has been falling by roughly an order of magnitude every year or two. Models become faster, cheaper, and more capable. Tasks that once required highly paid specialists can increasingly be done with a prompt and a bit of patience.

We are moving toward a world where intelligence is no longer a scarce resource. We are moving toward a world where intelligence becomes infrastructure - similar to electricity, compute, or the internet.

You do not need to own a power station to use electricity. You plug into the grid. You do not need a data centre to run software. You rent compute from providers like AWS or Cloudflare. And now you do not need to personally hold every piece of expertise in your head to build something ambitious. You can access intelligence when you need it, through APIs from labs like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, or open-weight models hosted on Hugging Face.

This changes something fundamental.

For most of modern history, the ability to build ambitious things depended heavily on access to highly skilled people. Startups needed teams. Researchers needed institutions. Builders needed specialists. Now the barrier is collapsing.

A single person with a laptop and curiosity can design software systems, write production code, analyse complex datasets, generate research summaries, build websites and applications, explore business ideas, and prototype products.

Things that previously required teams can increasingly be done by individuals. Not because humans suddenly became smarter, but because intelligence is becoming a commodity.

And commodities tend toward zero cost.

We have seen this pattern before. Compute used to be rare and expensive - until Moore’s Law made it almost free. Storage used to be scarce. Now we measure it in petabytes. Bandwidth used to be limited. Now we stream high resolution video without thinking.

AI is following the same trajectory, only faster. Each year the cost of useful reasoning drops. Each year the tools improve. Each year the gap between “having an idea” and “building something real” gets smaller.

That is why this moment feels so exciting. For the first time in history, access to intelligence is becoming democratized.

The kid in a bedroom with a strange idea now has access to tools that rival the analytical power that once only existed inside universities, corporations, and governments. A curious person can explore fields that previously required years of formal training just to get started.

When intelligence becomes cheap and abundant, creativity becomes the limiting factor - not knowledge, not credentials, not access. Just imagination.

Of course, intelligence alone does not guarantee wisdom. Humans still have to decide what to build, what to optimise for, and what kind of world we want these tools to help create. Organisations like the Partnership on AI and the Center for AI Safety exist precisely because the question of how we deploy this new capability matters as much as the capability itself.

But the opportunity in front of us is enormous.

We are entering a period where the ability to build things is expanding faster than at any point in human history. Nobody fully knows what people are going to create when intelligence becomes universally accessible.

We are about to find out.

And it is a fascinating time to be alive.

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