The Cheapest Intelligence In History

Right now you can buy the most capable intelligence that has ever existed for a flat monthly fee. I do not think that will last.

I checked my own usage this week and nearly fell off my chair. My Codex agents used 4.6 billion tokens in the last month. 1.3 billion of those came on a single day. And I max out my Claude plan every week on top of that.

Yet almost none of it came from me typing into a chat window. Agents used the tokens. They research, write drafts, examine files, test systems, red team the work, and keep my documentation current, across several projects at once, all while I am doing something else.

Through the API, that usage would cost a fortune. On my plans, I pay the same flat amount no matter how much I use, until I hit the plan usage limits. These companies are heavily subsidizing usage through these plans to buy market share. Right now it is an all you can eat buffet, and it will not stay open forever.

So while it is open, take advantage. Use everything you are already paying for to build things that were impossible for you 2 years ago. If you are on one of these plans and only using it to write the odd email, you are using maybe 5% of what you bought, and leaving the cheapest intelligence in history sitting on the table.

And I will tell you where the other 95% goes. It goes into putting AI to work instead of talking to it. A chatbot waits for your next question. An agent has a job, context, rules and a schedule, and it keeps working after you walk away. Once a few of those are running across a business, the token numbers start stacking up. So does the amount of finished work.

Which brings me to the part that actually matters.

Anyone can buy intelligence now, including your competitors. They have access to exactly the same models at exactly the same price. The AI itself gives you no edge, because everyone has it.

The advantage comes from agents that deeply understand YOUR world. Your customers, your offers, how you write, how you make decisions, what you would never do.

This is why I bang on about context so much. Context is how an agent learns your world. Research is how it stays current. Memory is how it keeps what it learns. Put those together with your feedback and you get what I call compounding intelligence, and you are going to hear a lot more about it in the future. An agent built this way improves the longer it works for you. Your competitors can buy the same intelligence as you. But they cannot buy what your agent learns as it works with you.

The takeaway this week is a shift in thinking.

Stop judging AI by the answers it gives you in a chat window, and start looking at where an agent could learn your world and take over real work. Last week I wrote about the new class of agents that float on rising intelligence instead of drowning under it. This is that class, and it is where I see the biggest advantage right now, especially for the people who move while it is still early. I have more coming here than I have talked about publicly. More on that soon.

I wrote a longer and more personal version of this on Patreon, including where I am taking things next: https://www.patreon.com/EvolutionUnleashedVIP/posts/1-3-billion-in-i-167081650