Let me tell you a story you already know but haven't connected to AI yet. "Everyone will have a PC in their home." True. Also created a permanent nerd class earning 3x median salary because they could use it beyond Excel and Facebook. "Everyone will have a smartphone." True. But you are THE PRODUCT when owning the cheap phone. "AI will raise everyone's floor." Also going to be true. And also going to mean absolutely nothing for the gap. The Training Cost Ceiling Nobody Wants to Talk About Everyone loves dunking on inference costs dropping. "It'll get cheaper! Efficiency! Moore's Law! Something!" Sure. Inference costs are falling. Cool. But frontier training ? Different beast entirely. You need proprietary datasets, PhD researchers who could otherwise be at DeepMind. You need compute clusters that cost more than the GDP of small countries. And the labs know it. Watch the rate limit trajectory over the past two years. Cheap subscription disappears. Rate limits tighten. Pro tier quietly inflates.…