Written by: jiayi

AI has changed our lifestyle habits, and this is a fact.

Using AI to write emails, creating PPTs with AI, searching for information with AI, and even having AI draft our social media posts. We have become accustomed to the presence of AI, as naturally as we are used to WiFi.

But few people stop to think about one question: is the AI you are using the same as the AI others are using?

The "fairness" of the AI era is the biggest illusion

Silicon Valley loves to tell a story: AI has given everyone a super assistant, knowledge is no longer a privilege of a few, everyone is equal.

It sounds beautiful. But the truth is—AI is fundamentally not fair; it competes based on financial resources.

From chips to computing power, from model training to token consumption, every stage of AI involves burning money.

An NVIDIA H100 chip costs over $25,000. Training a GPT-4 level model costs over one hundred million dollars. Every question you ask AI burns tokens in the background—and tokens have a price.

Claude Opus charges $5 for every million tokens input and $25 output. ChatGPT Pro is $200/month. Add in Perplexity, Cursor, Midjourney... a heavy AI user can easily spend over $500 a month on tools.

Some people spend $5,000 a month using AI to build competitive barriers, while others feel they are keeping up with the times using the free version of ChatGPT.

This is not the same track. It’s not even the same game.

At the national level: structural gaps are irreversibly widening

This logic becomes even more brutal at the national level.

The arms race of AI requires three things: chips, computing power, and talent. All three require huge amounts of capital.

One country, the United States, holds over 70% of the global AI computing power. China is trying to catch up, but chip bans have choked it. As for most developing countries—46 emerging market nations see entry-level broadband costs taking up 40% of monthly income.

When a young person in Nigeria struggles to access stable internet, how can we talk about "AI equality"?

94% of people in high-income countries can access the internet, while only 23% in low-income countries can. 84% in high-income countries have 5G coverage, compared to just 4% in low-income nations.

The starting line for third-world countries in the AI era is not just a step behind; they are completely unqualified to compete.

This structural gap cannot be overcome by effort alone.

At the individual level: your ceiling is being redefined by AI

The national-level logic applies equally to individuals.

There’s a phrase in my Twitter bio: personal ceiling = worldview + cognition + practical ability.

What has AI done to these three things?

▶️ First, AI has solved many practical efficiency problems.

Writing an industry report used to take a week; now it can be done in a day. Coding from scratch used to be the norm, but now AI can help you build the framework. In terms of efficiency, AI is indeed leveling the playing field.

▶️ But second, AI greatly amplifies cognitive gaps.

With the same AI tool, what you ask, how you ask, and your ability to judge whether the AI's answers are right or wrong—this all entirely depends on your existing cognitive level.

A person with deep understanding uses Claude for research; they know which questions to ask, how to follow up, and which answers have gaps that need verification. AI saves them 80% of execution time, which they can use for deeper thinking.

What about a person with shallow cognition? They throw questions at AI and just use whatever it gives them. They stop thinking critically. Over time, they cease to think at all. AI hasn’t made them smarter; it has made them lazier and dumber.

▶️ Third, the gap in delivery quality will become increasingly larger.

Based on your existing cognition to ask AI questions, the deviations in depth, accuracy, and timeliness of the outputs can be exponential. Using Claude Opus, one person may produce deep insights, while another may produce seemingly reasonable but meaningless drivel.

A particularly interesting study from Aalto University in Finland shows that the more one uses AI, the more they tend to overestimate their abilities. AI makes you "feel" stronger—outputs seem professional and fluent. But if you cannot distinguish good from bad, you are just producing "refined mediocrity."

Thus, gaps in worldview, cognition, and practical ability—these three dimensions are infinitely amplified in the AI era.

The smart become smarter, the cognitively aware deepen their understanding, and the wealthy use better tools to create larger distances. Meanwhile, those at the other end become lazier, shallower, and poorer with AI’s "help."

Cost × Cognition: Dual gaps are compounding

There’s a logical chain many people haven’t understood:

Money determines what level of AI you can use → The level of AI determines the quality and depth of the information you acquire → The quality of the information determines your cognitive boundaries → Cognitive boundaries determine the quality of your decisions → The quality of your decisions determines how much money you can earn.

This is a closed loop. The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.

The free version of ChatGPT has a hallucination rate of nearly 40%. That means if you ask it 10 questions, 4 answers are made up. The paid version GPT-4 has a hallucination rate of 28%, with the latest version dropping to 45%.

Decisions made using the free version and those made using Opus will, over time, lead to two completely different life trajectories.

There will always be a huge information gap in this world. AI hasn’t eliminated the information gap; it has turned it into a paywall.

Those who circumvent the wall and those who don’t are already in two different worlds

Here’s an observation that makes me very wistful.

The fact that you can read this article likely means you can circumvent the wall and browse on Twitter.

But think about it—how many people around you cannot circumvent the wall? When you talk to them, don’t you already feel a clear difference in cognitive levels?

This isn’t an IQ gap. This is a long-term cognitive differentiation caused by the information environment.

One person is exposed daily to the world’s cutting-edge information, the deepest discussions, and the highest quality content creators. Another person sees short videos fed by algorithms and a filtered information flow every day.

After five or ten years, these two people's ways of thinking, judgment abilities, and worldviews become completely different.

The AI era has amplified this gap even more. Those who can circumvent the wall use Claude, Perplexity, and the best global AI tools. Those who cannot circumvent the wall—ChatGPT is blocked in China, Claude is blocked in China—can only use localized alternatives or acquire them at a premium through agents.

The "walls" in the AI era are not just physical firewalls. There are language barriers—cutting-edge AI models are optimized for English far beyond other languages. There are also paywalls. And algorithmic echo chambers. Each wall divides people into different worlds.

Research from Stanford University shows that non-English users consume five times the tokens when using AI for the same content. That means you spend the same amount of money but receive less information with lower quality.

The most terrifying thing: you have already fallen behind, but you don’t know it

This is the point I want to emphasize the most in this entire article.

The free version of AI can still answer questions. It can help you write. It can help you search. So users of the free version may feel—"I am also using AI, I haven’t fallen behind."

But the reasoning of the free version is shallower, has more hallucinations, and provides older information. The answers you get may "look" correct, but in reality, they are filled with misleading errors.

It’s like two people are both "running." One is genuinely running forward, while the other is jogging in place on a treadmill. Both think they are running, but only one is making progress.

In psychology, there’s a concept called the Dunning-Kruger effect: the less one knows, the more they think they understand. AI has amplified this effect tenfold— the more you rely on AI, the stronger you think you are. But you are no longer capable of independent thought; you just don’t realize it yet.

This is the most brutal aspect of the AI era.

It’s not that AI will replace you. It’s that those who use better AI and have deeper understanding will leave you far behind. And you may not even understand how you fell behind until the day you are eliminated.