Are You Driving a "Used Sedan"
or a "Ferrari"
in the New AI Economy?

The era of subsidized AI is over. Intelligence now has a price, and we are all starting to feel the gap.

Someone recently shared an anecdote on X that stuck with me: they were in a legal debate by email with someone using free ChatGPT while they had the paid version. Their words: it felt like having an expensive legal team against a public defender.

That framing is more accurate than it sounds.

The new tiers of intelligence

Here is the current landscape, mapped to something we all understand, the car you drive:

The moment you feel the gap

We are now living in a world of intelligence inequality.

In my day-to-day use of AI, I have become faster than ever at recognizing subpar performance. You ask a question and the AI gives you an answer that makes you regret the energy that went into generating it.

The real frustration hits when you are locked into that AI, when you know exactly what you want, you know exactly what it should produce, and it still disappoints. You're no longer the limitation. The model is.

It feels like something is physically limiting you. You have been cheated of your own capacity.

Where this is headed

AI companies will not win with per-seat subscriptions. Intelligence is becoming a basic need. We will not keep paying monthly fees per person indefinitely.

I believe the AI laptop — a local 128 GB RAM machine running a great open source model — is the next major consumer device (Trust me on this, I am good with predictions of the future, I founded my company Jon AI in 2021 before the AI boom). The AI PC is what the laptop was twenty years ago. Every household will have one, and people will demand it the same way they demand running water and internet access.

For cloud AI, the only sustainable commercial model is one that makes financial sense at an organizational level, not an individual one.This is exactly why we built a different B2B model at Jon AI. Instead of pricing out individual users, we offer flat-rate structures—like our plan at $200 a month—to equip all employees in a company with the intelligence they need, bridging the gap without breaking the payroll.

Because ultimately, companies will not be able to afford both enterprise AI subscriptions and competitive salaries. They will provision basic AI and leave the rest to the individual. Like companies providing basic $20 basic Claude Code access to employees, but leaving it to them to upgrade to the $100/mo version if they want to.

Someone said that we will all have personal assistants in the AI age, but what they forgot to mention is that we will have to individually pay for them. Do you want to work less? Pay for the AI that can do more of your work for you. Do you want to be more creative? Pay for the AI that can elevate your ideas.

And this leads to a future where AI Hyperscalers will be motivated to create the best possible intelligence for the Ferrari tier, but not for the Basic Sedan tier. The gap will only widen, and the divide will only deepen. The Claude Opus will be available for $1,000/mo, but the free tier will run out of credits after a few questions, and the $20/mo version will be equivalent to what you can get from your 128 GB RAM laptop running a local model. The AI economy will be split between those who can afford the Ferrari and those who can't.

There will be less AI replacement, and more "AI high society". Poverty will be relying a lot on your own brain and local AI model to think and get things done.