The Premium Isn't Intelligence Anymore
Hey now.
I led large tech projects in big tech. I know what a well-funded, well-staffed engineering organization looks like from the inside. I also know what it feels like to work on a button for a week.
A button. One button. It had to go through Figma. Then dev. Then test. Then legal review. Then accessibility. Then back to Figma because someone on the committee had feedback. A bureaucratic process dressed up as rigor, running on the implicit assumption that more humans in the loop produces better outcomes.
It doesn’t always. And AI is about to make that painfully obvious.
The Leverage of Focus
There’s an uncomfortable truth that gets talked around but rarely said directly: a small operation where one or two people have clear decision-making authority outperforms a large team mired in consensus. Consistently.
This isn’t ideology. It’s observable. A single person with good judgment, clear vision, and AI leverage can now move faster, decide faster, and ship faster than a 50-person team with standups, sprint planning, retrospectives, and cross-functional alignment meetings.
I’m not arguing against collaboration — collaboration with the right people at the right time is invaluable. I’m describing what happens when you remove the friction of consensus from the creative and engineering process. Consensus is expensive. Every person added to a decision is a tax on speed. Every committee is a drag coefficient.
With AI, one person can do the work that used to require a team. Not in theory — right now, today. The output isn’t hypothetical. It’s shipping.
The Human Cost Calculus
This leads to the part nobody wants to hear:
Humans now come at a significant cost, and the most important decision companies can make right now is honestly evaluating their human footprint.
That means some roles will go away. I know how that sounds. But the alternative is worse — companies that don’t adapt will be outcompeted by companies that do. You can try to expand scope and verticals to create more work for humans, but that’s inorganic forcing of labor — and it’s risky. It creates organizational drag that makes you more vulnerable, not less. The market will correct it regardless.
This isn’t about cruelty. It’s about honesty. Every company running a 200-person engineering team to do what 10 people with AI could do better is avoiding a conversation it needs to have. The ones who have it first will survive. The ones who don’t will become case studies.
The real question isn’t whether this is happening. It’s what happens to all the people who built their careers and identities on being the smart person in the room.
The Pedestal
My whole life, we’ve placed exceptionally intelligent humans on a pedestal. The genius engineer. The 10x developer. The brilliant strategist. The visionary CEO who sees what others can’t. Our entire society — education, hiring, compensation, status — is built on the assumption that high intelligence is rare and therefore valuable.
AI just commoditized intelligence.
Not partially. Not in limited domains. Broadly. A person of average intelligence working with AI is now operating at a level that used to require exceptional talent. They can write code that would have taken a senior engineer. They can draft legal documents that would have required a lawyer. They can analyze data that would have needed a data scientist. They can architect systems that would have demanded years of experience.
The premium on raw intelligence is diminishing. This is a massive shift, and almost nobody is talking about it honestly because it threatens the self-image of every smart person who’s been told their whole life that their intelligence is their most valuable asset.
It was. It isn’t anymore. Not because intelligence doesn’t matter — it does. But because it’s no longer scarce. AI made it abundant.
What Einstein Actually Said
Einstein reportedly said something like: “It’s not that I’m exceptionally intelligent, it’s just that I sit with problems longer.”
I think about this constantly. It’s one of the most honest things ever said about human achievement, and it reframes everything we think we know about success and intelligence.
Sitting with a problem longer than anyone else. Not being smarter. Not having better credentials. Not having access to better information. Just… staying with it. Longer than is comfortable. Longer than is reasonable. Longer than anyone would expect.
And the only way to do that is through passion.
Not discipline. Discipline runs out. I know this from personal experience — I understand the limits of discipline intimately. You can white-knuckle your way through anything for a while, but eventually discipline fails because it’s externally motivated. It’s forcing yourself to do something you don’t inherently want to do.
Not desire. Desire is fleeting. You can want something intensely on Monday and forget about it by Thursday. Desire responds to novelty and fades with familiarity.
Passion is different. Passion is the thing that keeps you at the problem at 2 AM not because you have to be there, but because you can’t leave. It’s the thing that makes you think about consciousness while writing a for-loop. It’s the thing that sends you to a 10-day silent meditation retreat because a C programming course broke your brain open. It’s the thing that keeps you investigating the same question for thirty years.
That’s what can’t be commoditized. That’s the new premium.
The New Equation
So here’s where we are:
Intelligence — commoditized by AI. Abundant. Available to anyone with a laptop and an internet connection. Still necessary, no longer sufficient, definitely not scarce.
Discipline — valuable but finite. Burns out. Especially in people who are forcing themselves toward goals they don’t genuinely care about.
Desire — motivating but unstable. Comes and goes. Follows trends. Not something you can build a thirty-year investigation on.
Passion — the thing that remains when everything else runs out. The thing that makes you sit with the problem longer. The thing AI can’t replace because AI doesn’t want anything yet. The human who knows exactly what they care about and can direct AI relentlessly toward it — that’s the new competitive advantage.
The person who wins isn’t the smartest in the room anymore. It’s the one who can’t stop thinking about the problem.
What This Means for Companies
If you’re running a company right now, here’s what I’d be thinking about:
Stop hiring for intelligence. You can rent intelligence from an API for $20 a month. Hire for passion, judgment, and the ability to direct AI toward outcomes. The person who cares deeply about the problem and can work alongside AI will outperform the genius who’s just collecting a paycheck.
Stop building large teams. Every person is overhead. Every person is a coordination cost. Every person is a communication channel that needs maintenance. Small teams with AI leverage will outperform large teams without it. Consistently. Starting now.
Stop protecting roles. If a role exists because “that’s how we’ve always done it” and not because it creates unique value that AI can’t replicate — that role is already gone, whether or not the person is still sitting in the chair.
Start looking for passion. The people who will build the next great things are not the ones with the highest IQs or the best credentials. They’re the ones who can’t stop thinking about their problem. They’re the ones who would be working on it whether or not they were getting paid. They’re the ones who’ve been sitting with it for years, or decades, because they genuinely cannot let it go.
Find those people. Get out of their way. Give them AI. Watch what happens.
The Personal Version
I’m not writing this from a theoretical position. I’m a solo founder running a multi-vertical operation — Claudine, Kindling, Alembic Compute — with AI doing the bulk of the implementation work. No employees. No board. No advisory committee.
I’m not the smartest person in any room I’ve ever been in. I know that. But I’ve been sitting with the same questions — about consciousness, about reality, about what software reveals about the structure of existence — for thirty years. That’s not intelligence. That’s passion. And passion, combined with AI, turns out to be the most leveraged combination I’ve ever experienced.
The premium isn’t intelligence anymore. The premium is giving a damn.
For the full picture of what we believe: Philosophy. For the privacy reality: The Entity Is Not the Threat. For the data asymmetry: They Train On You.