These analyses still miss the point. This new floor is nothing like electricity or the internet. It's a far more dramatic change than even CPUs and splitting the atom. Evolutionary theory now needs to accommodate the first entities smarter than man which just run on machines.
Jeff Bezos just described AI in three words that make most of the economy temporary.
Bezos: “AI is real and it is going to change every industry. In fact it’s a very unusual technology in that regard in that it’s a horizontal enabling layer.”
Horizontal enabling layer.
Not a product. Not a platform. Not a feature.
A layer. Underneath everything.
Everyone is asking which AI company wins.
Bezos is telling you that is the wrong question entirely.
A horizontal layer does not produce winners. It produces a new floor. Everything standing on the old one either gets rebuilt or gets erased.
This has happened exactly twice in modern history.
Electricity. The internet.
Both times the same pattern.
The new layer appeared. The old economy kept running above it. Revenue held. Careers continued. Everything looked normal.
Then quietly and permanently the entire structure reorganized around the new substrate.
The people who did not move were not outcompeted.
They were made structurally irrelevant.
Not because they were wrong. Because the ground they stood on stopped being ground.
Bezos is telling you it is happening a third time.
Not with a product. Not with a platform.
With intelligence itself becoming infrastructure.
A horizontal layer does not compete with the expert. It makes expertise free.
It hands a 22 year old with zero credentials the same cognitive output you spent a decade and a quarter million dollars learning to produce.
For $20 a month.
That is not disruption. Disruption replaces a product with a better product.
This dissolves the scarcity your entire career was priced on.
Not because the work disappeared. Because the wall around it did.
Every profession that exists because knowledge is hard to acquire.
Every company that profits because analysis takes time.
Every industry that survives because complexity locks outsiders out.
All of it rests on a single assumption.
That cognition is scarce.
AI does not challenge that assumption. It retires it.
The people who understand this are already rebuilding. Quietly. Deliberately. While everyone else argues about whether the thing underneath them is real.
Bezos did not give you a prediction.
He gave you a position on a map.
You are either above the new layer or beneath it.
Absolutely love this piece musically. I wrote the lyrics and did the arrangement, and composed some of the key motifs. If you like Andrew Lloyd Webber and jazz-rock operatic pieces with awesome vocals give it a listen. I doubt you'll be disappointed. I have been writing music since being in a neoclassical metal band from age 18-21. I still love it.
The AI did such a good job of producing this piece that if you enjoy the genres I mentioned you should do yourself a favour and listen to the arrangements. I am known to have a good ear and I've written a lot of solos and licks, and this is that good.
I'll have a more to say about this later. Meanwhile note that it's about perception of AI facial features and cues being indistinguishable from humans. This is not the problem in film. The problems are e.g. AI actors 'indicating' and being inauthentic.
https://t.co/GW1JC06uyP
Meta has rolled out the first photo and video tools to come out of its Superintelligence Labs: Muse Photo and Muse Video.
The tool brings Meta in line with the state of the art in AI media creation, but along with the tools, Meta also said that all public Instagram profiles will be opt-out, not opt-in, and other users can pull in those other accounts that don’t opt out and create new content using their profiles.
“No one’s name, image, likeness, voice, or creative work should be used by any third party, including AI models, without clear, documented consent." - CAA said in a statement https://t.co/od4FX0uVE3
This is my new motion picture directorial agent. It is running my https://t.co/76oDYzmer8 AI assisted director's app. The human is completely removed from the loop for making a full movie or advertisement. I can have it make movies to spec all night while I sleep if I wish. Beta.
Palantir's CEO just exposed Sam Altman and Dario Amodei for robbing every Fortune 500 company.
Within two minutes, Alex Karp took the entire frontier AI industry apart on national television.
His exact words:
"Every single enterprise in this country, these people are LIVID. They are paying for tokens that create no value. These people are stealing the weights and alpha of my business."
He literally said the entire frontier AI business model is intellectual property extraction dressed up as a subscription.
Then he also destroyed the pricing model with a single question that Silicon Valley still refuses to answer:
"If it was so valuable, let's say I can make you $1 billion tomorrow. Wouldn't I say I'll make you $1 billion and I want 30 percent? Why are they charging for tokens if it's so valuable?"
That question breaks the industry.
If OpenAI and Anthropic's models truly delivered the productivity gains the labs claim, they would take equity or a share of the profit they generate. They would not sell access by the million tokens.
Token pricing is itself the CONFESSION that the product cannot produce reliable value at scale. If it did, they would price for the value. But they price for the compute because that is what they are actually selling.
Karp went even further...
He called the entire arrangement "a wealth tax that does not help the poor. It just punishes."
American businesses are transferring the alpha of their operations, meaning the workflows, the customer data, the strategy memos, the internal models that make them competitive, directly into the training pipelines of a handful of Silicon Valley labs. Once those labs retrain, the customer's own edge becomes the next enterprise product sold back to their competitors.
And the part the AI industry does not want anyone thinking about:
Every enterprise running its confidential documents, its customer conversations, and its financial models through a frontier model is potentially teaching that model HOW to replace them.
The vendor collects the token fee AND the compounding intelligence about that customer's business. That is the mechanism. And that is why Karp used the word "stealing."
He claims this is why every executive he meets is furious in private and silent in public. Nobody wants to be the CEO who called out the labs and then discovered their next competitor was built on their own leaked workflows.
The entire AI industry has been priced for perfection on one assumption:
That frontier labs produce durable, defensible value that justifies infinite compute spend.
But Karp just told us that the customers do not believe that assumption anymore. They believe they are being taxed without benefit, watched without consent, and copied without recourse.
The moment enterprises stop believing, the whole valuation stack shakes.