The dawn of abundant intelligence
We are standing at the edge of a civilizational upgrade: intelligence is about to become abundant. For most of human history, progress has been gated by a brutal constraint: the cost of clear thinking. Expertise was scarce, attention was limited, and the best judgment could only be rented by the few. But as artificial intelligence drives the price of cognition toward zero, that constraint begins to break. When every person, every classroom, every clinic, every small business, every public institution can summon high-quality reasoning on demand, we don’t just get faster work—we get faster discovery, better decisions, and shorter timelines to solutions. This is how a flourishing future arrives: not by wishing harder, but by multiplying the world’s capacity to understand, to plan, to invent, and to act wisely. We’re early, but the direction is unmistakable.
Why intelligence has been scarce
Intelligence, at its core, is not trivia. It’s decision-quality: the power to apply knowledge and skill to choose well, especially under uncertainty. It’s the difference between reacting and steering; between guessing and diagnosing; between motion and progress. When a person, a team, or a society has more intelligence available, they don’t just “know more.” They allocate resources better, avoid predictable mistakes, spot second-order effects earlier, and convert effort into outcomes with less waste.
For most of human history, one of the most consequential forms of scarcity has not been material at all: it has been access to intelligence—the kind that turns complexity into direction. Human intelligence is precious, but it is limited by time, attention, and years of training, which is why it tends to be expensive and unevenly distributed. In practice, that scarcity shows up in the places people feel it most: a family facing a medical scare and realizing that the best guidance comes with a bill they cannot absorb; a parent watching a child struggle in school and knowing that the right tutor—patient, attentive, and truly individualized—may be financially out of reach; a small business owner making high-stakes decisions alone, without the counsel that larger organizations take for granted. It takes years to educate and train a capable professional. It takes time to develop judgment. It takes attention to understand context. And because expert attention is finite, access to high-quality thinking has often been rationed: the best tutors, doctors, analysts, and advisors tend to concentrate where money and institutions can afford them. This is the constraint that has quietly governed human progress. Abundance is how we break it.
What abundance unlocks
Artificial intelligence changes the economics. Once intelligence can be produced and delivered at scale, the constraint shifts. We will be able to deliver extra units of intelligence at near-zero marginal cost, which is how abundance becomes possible. Economists have a name for a recurring twist in the story of progress: Jevons paradox. When technological advancements make a resource more efficient, each use consumes less of it and the cost per use falls; yet the lower cost often expands demand so much that total consumption rises. Jevons first observed this with coal, where efficiency did not shrink coal’s role; it widened it by making coal-powered work cheap enough to spread everywhere. We have seen the same arc in computing: as the cost fell and access widened, what was once “enterprise-grade” became ordinary, and demand exploded because new use-cases appeared. Intelligence is now entering that same curve. As the cost of reasoning falls, the price of access to high-quality judgment begins to collapse. Projects that never started will start. Experiments that never ran will run. Work that never penciled out will begin to pencil out. Intelligence stops being rationed and starts being deployed broadly. Instead of “Who can afford expertise?” the question becomes “How many good decisions can we enable per person, per day?” We can place more thinking where it has always been missing: in classrooms that need individualized help, in small businesses that lack staff, in public institutions under load, in communities navigating complex tradeoffs. That is the unlock: not replacing humans, but multiplying human capability—and compressing the time between problem, insight, and action.
We need more intelligence in the world—not as a luxury good, but as a foundation. Not someday for a few, but soon for most people, at a cost that no longer gates access. And this is where artificial intelligence matters: unlike human attention, it can be scaled. As intelligence becomes abundant and low-cost, it has the potential to make what was once rare feel ordinary so that clarity replaces confusion, confidence replaces anxiety, and solutions arrive faster than problems can compound. In an era of abundant intelligence, better decisions stop being a privilege. They become part of the public fabric.
In the near future, the world will begin to feel less like a maze. It will open like a landscape at sunrise, navigable and full of possibility for most people. Imagine research and invention with far more minds in the room, not only in elite labs, but everywhere curiosity exists. Millions of scientists, engineers, clinicians, educators, and builders equipped with constant analytical support, able to explore more ideas, run more experiments, spot more patterns, and share breakthroughs faster. Entire categories of work that once took years of trial and error begin to compress. Discoveries that were previously “too hard”, “too expensive”, or “too slow” start to move into the realm of the doable. New antibiotics and antivirals arrive before outbreaks become global. Early detection and personalized treatment push cancer, diabetes, and neurodegenerative disease into retreat. Clean energy and storage scale faster than demand, and climate adaptation becomes engineering rather than despair. Materials breakthroughs reduce waste and unlock cleaner manufacturing. Food systems become more resilient, and supply chains less fragile. This is what happens when thinking becomes scalable: the frontier stops being limited by how few experts we can assemble, and starts being shaped by how much intelligence we can apply. More intelligence means faster iteration, and faster iteration is how progress compounds.
But the impact will not be reserved for the frontier. It will show up in ordinary life, quietly at first, and then everywhere. A student with questions will not have to wait for the perfect teacher to be available. A parent planning a future will have more clarity and better options. A worker will have tools that remove the dull, repetitive tasks and amplify the meaningful ones. A creator will be able to build, write, design, and ship at a level that previously required a team. It will show up in the daily frictions that drain lives: navigating forms, contracts, and bureaucracy; understanding rights and options; translating across languages and systems; making sense of a medical report, a loan document, a school policy, or a legal notice; planning a move, a career change, a caregiving schedule, or a family budget without flying blind. For most people, the enemy is not a lack of ambition. It is the cost of clarity. Intelligence turns resources into outcomes, and good intentions into working systems. It is the ingredient that makes progress repeatable. When intelligence becomes widely available, problems that feel immovable begin to yield, and everyday life becomes less daunting. Progress stops being scarce. It becomes something we can reliably produce.
Making it real
We founded NOUS because we believe abundant intelligence is no longer a distant idea. It is within reach, and it will reshape everything. The real question is whether it arrives unevenly, concentrated where it always has been, or whether we help distribute it to the places where it is most needed. Our mission: Building a more intelligent world. We hold a simple conviction: intelligence is the foundational unlock. If there is a single lever that can expand everything else, it is intelligence.
There is a phrase that captures where this is heading. Sam Altman wrote: “Intelligence too cheap to meter is well within grasp.” If that is true, then we are not merely getting better tools. We are gaining a new kind of capacity, one that can spread as widely as electricity and change the baseline of what most people can do. It means intelligence stops being something you wait for, pay dearly for, or travel to access. It becomes something you can reach, in the moment you need it, with the kind of steadiness that turns pressure into clarity. When intelligence becomes that abundant, it lifts the floor for everyone. It turns more of life into the solvable. It gives more people the ability to learn faster, decide better, build sooner, and recover time from the burdens that quietly steal it. This is the future we are committing to make practical: intelligence that arrives not as a novelty, but as a reliable force for progress in real lives.
Costa Rica should not watch this future arrive from the sidelines. We have the talent to build, the grit to learn fast, and the advantage of a small country: shorter distances between decisions and outcomes. If intelligence is becoming abundant, then our responsibility is to make it real here too, in our schools, in our clinics, in our businesses, in our public institutions, and in the daily reality of people’s lives. We can become a reference point for the region. At NOUS, we are following multiple lines of research across the industries that matter the most in Costa Rica and the region, asking a practical question: where can abundant intelligence produce the biggest step-change in outcomes? From there, we will do what this moment demands. We will create tools that work, teach people how to use them well, and measure the progress they unlock.
This is what NOUS exists to do. We are here to help build the rails the future will run on. That future becomes real through secure, dependable infrastructure; through tools that fit real work, so intelligence translates into better decisions inside real workflows; and through education that helps people and organizations learn how to think with these tools, so the benefits spread instead of concentrating. We are researching and building in parallel because this moment rewards velocity, but it also demands rigor. Our aim is simple and enormous at the same time: to raise the baseline of what people, companies, and institutions in Costa Rica and the region can do, and to prove that a small country can help shape a future defined by abundant intelligence.
If intelligence is the master key, then our responsibility is to put it into more hands, in more places, with standards that earn trust. The era ahead is not defined by scarcity. It’s defined by intelligence on tap—and the compounding progress it can unleash. Building a more intelligent world means that more problems yield, more people rise, and more life is spent on what matters. We are here to help make that real.
Non est ad astra mollis e terris via.