AI is not the first technology to drop prices by multiple orders of magnitude. When screws were handmade, output was cou…
SemiAnalysis Twitter · SemiAnalysis (@SemiAnalysis_) · 2026-05-21
SemiAnalysis draws an analogy between AI price deflation and the industrial screw revolution, arguing the real transformation is not cheaper existing use cases but entirely new applications enabled at scale.
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Extraction
Topics: ai-economicstechnology-price-deflationcompute-scalingtechnology-history
Claims
- AI is not the first technology to drop prices by multiple orders of magnitude.
- Screw manufacturing scaled from hundreds or thousands of units to trillions after industrialization.
- The transformative impact of AI, like screws, comes from enabling entirely new use cases rather than cheapening existing ones.
Key quotes
AI is not the first technology to drop prices by multiple orders of magnitude. When screws were handmade, output was counted in hundreds or thousands. Today output is in the trillions.
The revolution is not from making the few screws we used to use cheaper, but from building a...