Technology may unintentionally bring us back toward a very old model of capitalism: the owner-operated business.
For much of the twentieth century, economic scale often required managerial scale. Businesses became enormous organizations because coordinating thousands of people was necessary to produce enormous amounts of output.
AI may loosen that connection.
The company of the future could be surprisingly small.
A founder.
A handful of highly skilled employees.
Specialized outside partners.
AI systems performing much of the repetitive intellectual labor.
And enormous computing infrastructure accessed on demand rather than owned outright.
That structure could allow founders and employees to retain significantly more ownership of what they create.
Instead of building a 2,000-person organization to produce a billion-dollar company, perhaps you build a 75-person organization.
But that future depends on those 75 people having access to the same fundamental technological infrastructure as the 75,000-person incumbent.
Without that access, AI could reinforce today’s largest institutions rather than challenge them.
The Infrastructure Is the Opportunity
The internet demonstrated what can happen when enormously expensive infrastructure becomes broadly accessible.
AI gives us the opportunity to do it again.
We should want massive investment in data centers, energy generation, semiconductors, networks, and AI models.
But the ultimate measure of success shouldn’t simply be how much computing capacity we build.
It should be how many people can build something with it.
The most interesting AI company of 2035 may not exist today.
Its founders may still be in school.
They may be working inside another company.
They may be sitting somewhere with an idea nobody else believes in yet.
Our job isn’t to predict who they are.
It’s to make sure they can plug in.
Because the great economic lesson of the internet wasn’t simply that connectivity was powerful.
It was that broadly distributed access to powerful infrastructure unleashed innovation from everywhere.
AI could do the same.
But only if we build it that way.
