As AI models become as common as electricity, the real competitive advantage shifts. Discover the five critical second-order effects of AI commoditization and learn how industries are preparing for a transformed business landscape in 2026.
For the last several years, the conversation around artificial intelligence has been dominated by a narrative of scarcity and exclusive power. Having access to a state-of-the-art AI model was a golden ticket, a competitive moat that only a handful of tech behemoths could afford to build. That era is rapidly coming to a close. We are now entering the age of AI commoditization, where powerful models are becoming a standardized, widely accessible utility—much like cloud computing or electricity before them
This seismic shift is being accelerated by fierce market competition, the proliferation of high-performance open-source models, and aggressive pricing from major cloud providers. The first-order effects are already visible and dramatic. We’re seeing a race to the bottom on pricing, with some analyses showing that the cost of using top-tier models dropped by over 80% in just one year. This democratization of access is just the beginning. — Read More
Author Archives: Rick's Cafe AI
A tsunami of COGS
The AI industry is in correction mode. Last week Nvidia reported its earnings and the world was holding its breath. If they miss, it is so over. If they crush it, we are so back. In the end, earnings beat expectations, but the stock slid anyway after an initial bump. Many things in the AI boom smell bad. The way money fuels the investment spree is quite questionable and it has become a meme, with the same $1T investment check moving hands among a small set of participants. We can call this “vendor financing”, but it is not a great look.
In my opinion the players more at risk here are the hyperscalers like Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle, and the neocloud players like Nebius and CoreWeave. They are in between the providers of chips like Nvidia and the buyers of compute like OpenAI. They really have no choice other than buying real chips from Nvidia, and hoping that there will be sustainable demand (read: revenue > COGS) from buyers of compute so that they can honor those commitments. If not, the buyers of compute will walk away, resizing their commitments (or going bankrupt), Nvidia already sold those GPUs, and the hyperscalers are left with billions and gigawatts of unused capacity that depreciate very quickly due to the short GPU lifespan. — Read More
How a global company lets its employees build with 30+ LLMs
TELUS is one of Canada’s largest telecom companies. With more than 100,000 employees globally, it’s the very definition of an enterprise.
When it comes to AI, many enterprise companies seem to have the same cookie-cutter approach: deploy GPT-5, add some guardrails, and call it a day.
Not TELUS. Despite their size and all the complexities that come with enterprise-level ops, this global company is thinking about AI in a totally different way. And I want to share what they’re doing with you – I think there’s a lot to take away from their story. — Read More
AI is Rewiring the Economy
It’s cheaper to cover a hole in the wall with a flat screen TV than fill it. Stuff is cheap, services are expensive. AI is about to fix that.
You either believe AI will displace jobs or you think its hype. I think that’s the wrong question. The right question is how does AI reshape the economy.
AI will force us to reconsider commerce, consumerism and the norms of our economy. We will enter a world where consumers buy less stuff, but with much higher conversion. Middle-income consumer populations will have less disposable income as their jobs come under pressure from AI. Meaning consumerism ceases to be the driver of economic growth. — Read More
Boom, bubble, bust, boom. Why should AI be different?
The artificial intelligence revolution will be only three years old at the end of November. Think about that for a moment. In just 36 months AI has gone from great-new-toy, to global phenomenon, to where we are today – debating whether we are in one of the biggest technology bubbles or booms in modern times.
To us what’s happening is obvious. We both covered the internet bubble 25 years ago. We’ve been writing about – and in Om’s case investing in – technology since then. We can both say unequivocally that the conversations we are having now about the future of AI feel exactly like the conversations we had about the future of the internet in 1999.
We’re not only in a bubble but one that is arguably the biggest technology mania any of us have ever witnessed. — Read More
AI Prompt Engineering Course – Prompt Engineering Beginner COMPLETE Guide and for PROS (2025)
The Space of Intelligence is Large (Andrej Karpathy)
Something I think people continue to have poor intuition for: The space of intelligences is large and animal intelligence (the only kind we’ve ever known) is only a single point, arising from a very specific kind of optimization that is fundamentally distinct from that of our technology. — Read More
#humanThe First AI (foreign) English Teacher “Takes Office”: The Encounter Between Human Children and Artificial Intelligence
Today’s children are true “AI natives.” They are born and raised in the AI era; interacting with the digital world is an innate instinct. The AI entities that provide them with education must also be immersive, interactive, personalized, and warm.
The birth of AI English teacher Jessica heralds the future of education: no longer one-way knowledge transmission, but rather the natural acquisition of a communication ability to face the world through symbiosis and dialogue with AI. She possesses a vast amount of knowledge, boundless patience, a memory capable of remembering every child’s situation, and a warm heart—a true “super-teacher.” — Read More
Hitchhiker’s Guide to Attack Surface Management
I first heard about the word “ASM” (i.e., Attack Surface Management) probably in late 2018, and I thought it must be some complex infrastructure for tracking assets of an organization. Looking back, I realize I almost had a similar stack for discovering, tracking, and detecting obscure assets of organizations, and I was using it for my bug hunting adventures. I feel my stack was kinda goated, as I was able to find obscure assets of Apple, Facebook, Shopify, Twitter, and many other Fortune 100 companies, and reported hundreds of bugs, all through automation.
… If I search “Guide to ASM” on Internet, almost none of the supposed guides are real resources. They funnel you to their own ASM solution, and the guide is just present there to provide you with some surface-level information, and is mostly a marketing gimmick. This is precisely why I decided to write something.
This guide will provide you with insights into exactly how big your attack surface really is. CISOs can look at it and see if their organizations have all of these covered, security researchers and bug hunters can look at this and maybe find new ideas related to where to look during recon. Devs can look at it and see if they are unintentionally leaving any door open for hackers. If you are into security, it has something to offer you. — Read More
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s big warning to employees in his leaked memo: ‘Google has been doing excellent…’
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has conceded that the company is facing “rough vibes” and “economic headwinds” just days after Google reclaimed the AI performance crown with Google’s Gemini 3 Pro launch. According to The Information, a leaked memo from last month starkly contrasts with Altman’s public trillion-dollar ambitions and he reportedly warned employees that revenue growth could plummet to single digits by 2026. — Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 