Elvis Obi Claims AI Makes Attention a Scarce Resource in Intelligence as a Service
Elvis Obi stated that over the past three years, AI has made advanced intelligence widely accessible, allowing users to pay on demand for "Intelligence as a Service" (IaaS) without years of expertise or hiring specialists.
As intelligence becomes cheaper and more accessible, the competitive advantage of knowledge itself diminishes, shifting the scarce resource to human attention—the ability to capture, guide, and maintain it.
In market mechanisms, AI users and content creators become the main participants, with event-driven funding flowing towards attention economy tools and platforms, benefiting IaaS providers and attention management products, while traditional knowledge workers face pressure.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Elvis Obi has previously discussed the impact of AI on social structures, and this viewpoint continues to emphasize the value of attention in the commodification of intelligence. Earlier analyses of trends similar to IaaS reflect the transition from a knowledge economy to an attention economy.
From a capital perspective, AI reduces the cost of acquiring intelligence, leading businesses and individuals to shift resources towards capturing attention. The strategic motive is to build sustainable competitive barriers, with funding moving from knowledge reserves to content distribution and user engagement tools.
Similar to other tech observers' discussions on how AI reshapes competitive factors, the current AI industry is transitioning from capability expansion to deepening application scenarios, with attention becoming the next key leverage.
Essentially, this represents a technological substitution where AI IaaS replaces traditional expert knowledge, with the mechanism being the democratization of intelligence amplifying the scarcity of attention, resulting in pricing power shifting from knowledge holders to attention platforms, and driving the economic supply chain towards attention-driven reconstruction.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
Competitive Advantage = Intelligence Accessibility × Attention Control × Execution Transformation
Knowledge sells stock, attention sells flow; whoever masters IaaS defines the next generation of barriers.
The cheaper intelligence becomes, the more expensive attention is; the counterintuitive aspect is that the proliferation of AI accelerates the concentration of human focus capital.