Cost Over Capability

The AI discourse is overwhelmingly focused on capability: what the models can do, how they perform on benchmarks, whether they can reason. Moore's framework inverts this priority. The 1965 paper was not about what integrated circuits could do; it was about what they would cost. Each transformative moment in the semiconductor industry was not when chips got faster but when they got cheaper — and each cost threshold crossed created categories of users that had never existed in the previous cost regime. Edo Segal reports that his Trivandrum team achieved a twenty-fold productivity multiplier at a cost of one hundred dollars per person per month; Moore's framework identifies the hundred-dollar figure, not the twenty-fold multiplier, as the more consequential number.