The Real Cost of AI Isn't the Price Tag

Every few months, a new article drops with the same thesis: AI is too expensive, the bubble is about to pop, nobody can sustain these compute bills. And every time, I think the same thing. These people have never looked at an infrastructure cost curve before. I pay for inference. I pay for compute. I watch the bills. The cost is real and I'm not here to pretend otherwise. But I've also spent over a decade self-hosting infrastructure, and I've watched this exact movie before. The plot doesn't change. Only the actors do. The Paper Era In the 1960s, if a researcher at one university needed data from another faculty, the process was exactly what you think it was. Someone physically carried paper across campus. Stacks of documents. Walked down hallways. Handed over at a desk. That was the state of the art for knowledge sharing. Slow, expensive, limited to whoever could physically show up. The cost wasn't the paper. It was everything that didn't happen because sharing knowledge required a bo