It’s 2030.
And top-tier AI doesn’t cost you $5 to 10K a year anymore.
It’s $100,000 a year.
Per person.
And it’s worth every cent — if you plan to stay relevant.
Because this isn’t “productivity software.”
This is infrastructure for cognition.
A thinking stack.
A simulation engine.
A judgment amplifier.
You don’t pay for AI the way you used to pay for software.
You pay for access to possibility.
To speed.
To abstraction.
To the edge of what’s knowable before others even realize it exists.
From Bloomberg to Brainstorm
We used to call Bloomberg the elite tool — $30K/year to access markets.
In hindsight, that was quaint.
Because Bloomberg gave you prices.
This gives you moves.
What used to be a terminal is now an entire loop:
Perception → Prediction → Action → Adaptation.
Always running.
Always optimizing.
Always “on.”
You don’t type queries anymore.
You whisper intentions.
And your AI — trained on your knowledge graph, real-time feeds, your tone of voice, your strategic preferences — starts running simulations before the sentence is finished.
Not General-Purpose. You-Purpose.
The $100K AI isn’t some general-purpose model.
It’s your model. Fine-tuned. Fed. Bound to your workflows.
It remembers everything you’ve ever said, built, reviewed, deleted, or changed your mind about.
It auto-responds to emails in your tone.
It drafts contracts based on your previous disputes.
It rewires your calendar for strategic outcomes.
It tells you who to call — and who to ignore.
And under the hood?
It’s pulling from real-time financials, Slack threads, Zoom transcripts, niche datasets, and inference loops stitched together from dozens of proprietary tools.
The AI isn’t replacing you.
It’s weaponizing you.
$100K: What Are You Really Paying For?
- Your own hive of autonomous agents running 24/7.
- Private memory stores, retrieval-augmented logic, and domain-specific reasoning.
- Dedicated compute allocation — no rate limits, no model degradation.
- Guardrails tuned for your industry, your risks, your margins.
- Strategic foresight — not just answers, but consequences mapped before questions are asked.
This is no longer just cost.
It’s positioning.
A hundred grand a year isn’t for convenience.
It’s for survival in the loop.
The Loop Is Everything
Let’s be honest — most people are already out of it even in 2025.
They’re stuck prompting ChatGPT-4 with generic questions and making Studio Ghibli images.
Copy-pasting summaries.
Thinking that’s leverage.
Meanwhile, the new intelligence class is automating decisions, testing theories, running playbooks, refining judgment — all before breakfast.
They’re not reacting to the world.
They’re training against it.
And that loop — perceive, process, act, reflect — gets tighter the more you pay.
The more compute you rent.
The more agency you encode.
$100K doesn’t buy you a chatbot.
It buys you tempo.
It’s Not a Tool. It’s a Class Division
This isn’t about AI.
It’s about who gets to think at scale.
Who gets to simulate five moves ahead —
and who’s still stuck formatting a deck.
The great divergence isn’t intelligence vs. artificial intelligence.
It’s those with AI infrastructure vs. those without.
And like every infrastructure shift —
it starts as expensive, becomes invisible, and reshapes everything underneath it.
So yes, it now costs $100,000 a year to stay in the loop.
The real question is:
What happens to everyone priced out?
Because that’s the quiet part no one wants to say out loud:
In 2030, the cognitive economy is not open.
It’s paywalled.
And the cost of admission keeps rising.
Final Thoughts
This isn’t about AI.
It’s about enclosure.
What began as open intelligence is now cordoned off, priced high, and gated by compute.
$100K/year is the new moat — not just for capital, but for cognition.
The loop has closed, and those inside move faster than markets, faster than policy, faster than most humans can comprehend.
What we’re witnessing isn’t innovation — it’s privatized acceleration.
And like every system that centralizes power, it doesn’t need to be evil.
It just needs to be faster than you.
In the age of synthetic cognition, Predatorialism isn’t a metaphor.
It’s the operating system.
And it’s already running.
