Intelligence Gets a Utility Bill: When Tokens Sell Like Phone Credit, What's Still Worth Owning?

A major shopping platform now sells AI tokens in prepaid packs next to phone credit, which means intelligence finally has a retail price tag — and priced things behave like commodities. Daniel and Emily follow the money down the stack, from a gigawatt-scale chip campus in Inner Mongolia to fifteen-thousand-dollar factory tours, a leaked university syllabus, and the afternoon every chatbot went dark, to work out what an ordinary person should actually own. ## Hosts ### Daniel Altman Daniel Altman is a computer scientist and AI strategist with a background in engineering, quantitative research, and emerging technologies. He studies how technological breakthroughs reshape industries, markets, work, and human capabilities. ### Emily Carter Emily Carter is a business strategist and former technology product leader with experience building digital products and studying how innovation reaches millions of users. She focuses on AI adoption, business transformation, work, education, entrepreneurship, and leadership. ## Sources - https://www.infoq.cn/article/boiE7qfjxSQjHKUtevvp?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=article ## Episode Information Language: en Published: 2026-09-12T12:35:56.977516+00:00