Are you winning in the AI era or are you getting left behind?
Back in the early internet days a few tiny service providers in Toronto patched their gear together in a cramped room and agreed to share bandwidth. That handshake turned into one of the biggest internet exchanges in North America. People showed up for the common good. It felt like the nineties were built on curiosity, community, and a bit of Star Trek optimism. Then the giants arrived, and the innocence evaporated.
Jump to November 2023. ChatGPT 3.5 lands and the world lights up.
Finally, a global equalizer.
Education, geography, background none of it mattered. Anyone could tap into a tool with world changing potential. OpenAI was still not for profit, and the story was that AI would lift everyone.
Then the giants arrived again. Microsoft moved in. OpenAI shifted to a for profit model. Competitors raced forward. Grok. Claude. Google Gemini. Innovation exploded. And right behind it came something less inspiring.
The price of admission started climbing.
People who did not buy in started falling behind.
In my book Start. Scale. Exit. Repeat., I talk about Living in the Future. It means stepping into tomorrow before everyone else so you can spot the trends early. I always chased the fastest internet and the newest tech. I bought the early HDTVs. I drove the early Model X. Today I stack paid LLM memberships because they help me launch new companies and accelerate growth. Living in the future is how I ended up building and exiting more than a dozen tech companies over the past twenty-five years. So when AI hit, I jumped in full throttle.
Right now, we are sitting on the edge of the biggest technological shift in history. I believe it will mint more millionaires than anything before it. The winners will be the ones who choose to live inside an AI world instead of watching it from the sidelines.
ChatGPT 3.5 was just the spark. Since then, we have seen leaps in content creation, music, video, research, analysis, and everything in between. Every month another industry shakes.
And here is what hit me. I jump between AI tools all day building music videos, commercials, legal reviews, research, and more. Meanwhile almost no one around me pays for even the basic membership.
Today, real AI tools do not come cheap.
If you want to play the game, you will spend two hundred to five hundred a month. For me the return is endless. For early-stage entrepreneurs that price can feel like a locked door.
But using AI to launch a business is one of the biggest edges you can get. A simple example. I wanted to launch a YouTube video with no real experience. In the past I would hire an agency. This time I used a stack of AI tools and followed their step-by-step guidance. I bounced from model to model stealing the best of each one even while fighting daily limits. After a few weeks the video Made in America was ready and within seventy-two hours it crossed one hundred thousand views.
Three months earlier this would have been impossible without a big budget or serious creative chops. With AI it became accessible. But only because I paid for the tools.
So here we are. Are we repeating history? Are we building a new class of AI haves and AI have nots? Will big companies keep their edge while scrappy entrepreneurs get priced out?
No one knows how the future shakes out. But one thing is obvious. If you do not pay for it, you will not play with it. And if you don’t play with it, you won’t build wealth from it.