Everyone can build it. Almost no one can afford to run it at scale. And the companies selling the picks and shovels are about to get undercut by the same forces they unleashed. by VEKTOR Memory — 20 min read How This Article Started: 20 Forums, 40 Headlines, and a Growing Sense That Everyone Was Confused I woke up to clear skies and the sun finally shining, and I set out to understand this idea, the truth behind it, and the nagging suspicion that the narrative around AI and software costs had become so loud, so uniform, and so confidently confusing that someone needed to sit down and actually go through it. No tweets, or are they now X's? No LinkedIn thought leader infomercials, no Substack hype, just actual research and deep thoughts. So I spent time reading, collating data. Forums, whitepapers, LinkedIn posts, Hacker News threads, VC essays, Reddit arguments. I went looking for the real signal underneath the noise.…