AI Just Joined the Sea of Sameness – Our Commoditized Economy

by | Aug 4, 2026 | A.I., AI Disruption, Artificial Intelligence Impact, Branding, Distinction, Speaking, Speaking Industry | 1 comment

Distinction in the age of AI — barrel of intelligence graphic comparing AI token pricing across OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Chinese labs

Same barrel. Different price tag. Sound familiar?

Distinction in the age of AI just found its highest-profile test case yet. Brett Taylor is the chairman of OpenAI, the company that built the AI tool every other company on earth is scrambling to catch up to.

He said something a few weeks ago that stopped me. He said every CEO he talks to asks him the same two questions. Every single one.

“Am I getting value from my token spend?”

And: “What’s my moat in the age of AI?”

I’ve been asking rooms that second question for 27 years. I just never called it a “moat.” I called it your Dramatic Difference.

Same question. Different vocabulary. And the fact that the chairman of OpenAI can’t escape it either tells you exactly where we actually are.

The Sea of Sameness Has a New Member

I coined the phrase “Sea of Sameness” years ago after a frustrating hour comparing auto insurance quotes. Six companies. Same coverage levels. Same pricing. Same claims process. I could not find a single reason to prefer one over another, until I looked past the product entirely and started paying attention to the experience.

Since then, I’ve watched the same pattern repeat everywhere I look. Internet providers. Banks. Phone plans. Medical providers. Contractors. Mortgage companies. Even job candidates, 200 resumes with the same degrees, the same experience, the same skills. Commoditized. Interchangeable on paper.

This month, AI joined the list.

Chamath Palihapitiya put a number on it. He calls it “a barrel of intelligence,” his term for a million AI tokens, the basic unit of what these models actually sell. Right now, you can buy that barrel for $26 from OpenAI. Anthropic’s best model will run you $56. Elon Musk will sell it to you for $1. A Chinese lab most people have never heard of will sell it to you for fifty cents.

Same job. Same barrel. A hundred-times difference in price.

That’s not a technology story. That’s a commodity story. We’ve seen this movie before. Crude oil trades at one global price no matter whose name is on the rig, because crude is crude. AI’s raw output is heading in exactly the same direction.

Which Is Exactly Why the Chairman of OpenAI Is Fielding This Question

If the raw intelligence is a commodity, “which AI do you use” stops being a meaningful competitive question. That’s Brett Taylor’s problem. It’s every CEO’s problem. And, faster than most people realize, it’s every individual professional’s problem too.

Here’s what I want you to notice about how Taylor actually answers the moat question. He doesn’t say “trust us, we’re better.” He points to something specific and checkable, frontier models complete the same task in far fewer tokens than the cheap alternatives. A number. Evidence.

That’s not an opinion. That’s proof. And it’s exactly the move I’ve been teaching audiences for years, long before “moat” was the word anyone used for it.

The Big 3 Questions Nobody Gets to Skip

Every individual and organization I work with has to be able to answer three questions — clearly, convincingly, and in under 20 seconds:

What is your Dramatic Difference? Not your minor variation. Not your slight improvement. The thing about you that makes people think, “I can’t get that anywhere else.”

What is your Overt Benefit? Overt means obvious. Clear. Unmistakable. Can someone understand the value you create within ten seconds of meeting you?

What is your Reason to Believe? Anyone can claim to be different. Anyone can describe a benefit. Can you prove it, with results, with people who will vouch for you, with work that speaks for itself?

Notice something?  Those three questions were never really about the product. They were always about what happens after the commodity, after the insurance quote, after the loan rate, after the barrel of tokens. They were always about what you build on top of the thing everyone already has access to.

AI didn’t create that game. It just made it faster, more universal, and impossible to opt out of.

If you want a structured way to work through your own answers to these three questions, I built the Kryptonite Scorecard for exactly this, a self-assessment that shows you where your distinction is real and where it’s still aspiration.

Distinct, Not Best: The Real Test of Distinction in the Age of AI

Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead’s longtime frontman, said something I’ve never forgotten: “You do not merely want to be the best of the best. You want to be considered the only ones who do what you do.”

Best is a competition. Everyone in that 200-resume stack, every AI lab selling barrels of tokens, every insurance company in my browser tabs, they’re all competing to be best, or at least to look like it. Only a few are trying to be the only one.

When the raw material is priced at fifty cents a barrel and available to anyone with a credit card, “best” becomes a moving target nobody actually catches. “Only” doesn’t have that problem. Nobody else can be you.

Distinction in the Age of AI: The Urgency Has Changed

When everyone has access to the same intelligence, priced the same way, running on the same infrastructure, distinction stops being a nice-to-have positioning exercise. It becomes the only thing left to compete on.

Not better. Distinct.

Because the alternative was never just being unremarkable. It was always extinction. AI didn’t invent that choice. It just made it impossible to postpone.

Those prepared need not fear the forces at work.If you want the full framework behind distinction in the age of AI, it’s laid out in Distinct or Extinct.

 

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