The Future of AI: Ads, Tokens, and the Native Unit of Account
The Future of AI: Ads, Tokens, and the Native Unit of Account
The End of Differentiation
A friend of mine runs a small AI startup. Six months ago he was terrified of the next GPT release. Now he watches open-source models hit the same benchmarks his team spent millions chasing. Every Tuesday there is a new model. Every Thursday the old one is obsolete. The gap between the billion-dollar lab and the kid in a dorm room is collapsing.
AI is commodifying. Fast. What was once the exclusive terrain of the well-funded is now swarming with open-source contenders. Capabilities converge. Models blur. What remains to distinguish one offering from another? Not much. A few UX tricks. A sprinkle of memory. Maybe a slicker interface. None of these create a moat. They are sandcastles against the tide.
The costs, though. The costs remain. Every token generated carries a price, however small. Multiply it across billions of daily interactions, across multimodal streams of text, audio, and video. Suddenly “free AI” looks like a trillion-dollar hallucination. There is no such thing as a free token. Someone, somewhere, always pays.
The Advertising Temptation
The default answer is already in plain sight: ads.
Advertising has historically solved the problem of differential pricing. The same service has vastly different value depending on context. Writing bedtime stories for children? Low-value. Debugging code for an app serving millions? High-value. A flat subscription cannot capture that spread. Ads, however, can. They price attention and intent with surgical precision.
If this logic holds, the AI economy drifts into the same Faustian bargain that defined search and social. Subsidized access. Monetized attention. Only this time the integration goes deeper. No clumsy banners or pop-ups. Instead: generated recommendations woven into conversation, contextual purchases triggered by your queries, even parallel conversations running alongside your assistant. A whisper in your ear that sounds like your AI, but is really the marketplace speaking.
The Cost Spiral
A single inference run costs fractions of a cent. That is the figure everyone quotes. It is also the wrong number.
The cost curve of AI is deceptive. Yes, inference per token is getting cheaper. But usage is rising faster. Context windows expand. Memories lengthen. Agents do not just answer. They reason, plan, call tools, spawn subprocesses. A single user query can trigger a constellation of work running for minutes or hours.
Add AR glasses. Add ambient computing. Add constant life-logging. Suddenly every user becomes a firehose of expensive context. Efficiency gains may slow. Demand is insatiable. Costs climb.
The result: pressure. Pressure to monetize the free tier. Pressure to extract value from billions who cannot, or will not, pay. When pressure meets capital, advertising is the release valve.
The Native Ad Unit of AI
Google invented search ads. Facebook perfected social ads. TikTok weaponized the feed. Each medium found its native ad unit. AI will too.
We do not know its exact form yet. Boxed suggestions. Affiliate integrations. Invisible nudges stitched into dialogue. A dual-model structure: a “user AI” answering honestly, and a separate “ad AI” inserting commercial payloads in a controlled, firewalled way. That at least maintains the fiction that your assistant works for you.
But fiction is fragile. Once users suspect their AI is compromised, steering them to inferior products, manipulating outcomes for profit, the trust collapses. Will competition enforce reliability? Or will the hunger for revenue slowly corrupt every assistant until truth itself bends around the gravitational pull of advertising?
The Question of the Native Unit
Underneath the ad question sits a deeper one: what is the native unit of account for AI?
Advertising is one answer. Tokens-per-attention, subsidized by merchants. Subscription is another answer. Cleaner, more transparent, but limited by user willingness to pay.
A third answer is tokens themselves. Microtransactions for micro-inferences. A Hydra-like multichain economy where every interaction carries its own native settlement. Libertaria foresaw this. Local economies issuing their own currencies. Reputation and value flowing peer-to-peer. AI could be the proving ground where such decentralized units finally gain traction.
The stakes are immense. Whoever defines the native unit of AI does not just solve monetization. They set the economic grammar of the next epoch.
Conclusion: The Bargain Ahead
You are going to use AI every day. Billions of people will. The costs must be borne somewhere.
The world is addicted to “free.” Free is never free. Somewhere in the system, a unit of account emerges and anchors the economy of intelligence. The choice is familiar: do we let AI follow the advertising empires, cheap and universal but subtly corrupting? Or do we invent a new economic substrate? Reputation. Micro-tokens. Cooperative staking. Something that lets users pay in ways other than money or attention.
The only question is whether that unit belongs to us, or to the ads.