America 250 and the Intelligence Grid | Shimmy Says

" We've got a special "Shimmy Says" for you today, celebrating July 4th, America's 250th birthday. America was always a big experiment, and a 250-year-old experiment turning into the greatest country perhaps the world's seen is something to celebrate, and we shouldn't lose sight of that, no matter what side of the politics we're on and how we feel things are going. So as we head into this 4th of July weekend, I know a lot of you are going to be really celebrating.

We're going to have a ton of fireworks like we always do. You'll be going to your barbecues, your flags, parades. I'll be out on my boat, doing all the things we usually associate with America's birthday here on the 4th, and that's a good thing.

I like the 4th of July as much as anyone. But let's be real. Like most of you, this year feels a little bit unsteady.

There's so much going on in the world around us, in our country, our courts, our governments, in our towns, our families, our jobs. There's just a lot of unsettling stuff going on. We are here at America's 250th birthday, a quarter of a millennium.

That's a big number. It is a moment that deserves, frankly, more than just a long weekend, some fireworks, hot dogs, burgers, and maybe a drink or two. It deserves some reflection.

So I'm going to ask you to just chill on the celebration for a minute, and let's take a moment to reflect. I'm talking about the kind of reflection where we decide everything is not broken beyond repair, but it's not perfect either. America has always been an argument as much as a country.

It's always, as I said before, it's been an experiment, the grandest experiment of them all in many ways. Sometimes it's a messy experiment. Sometimes it's a painful one.

Sometimes it's extraordinary. Sometimes, though, let's be real, it feels like a giant reality or Jerry Springer Show. But when you step back and look at the sweep of the last 250 years, one thing becomes pretty clear.

America's greatness has not come only from what we believed in. It's come from what we've built. We built railroads that connected a continent.

We built electrical grids that turned night into day and changed homes, factories, cities, farms, life. We built highways that connected suburbs to farm, to urban areas, factories to cities, and so forth. We built highways that reshaped commerce and mobility.

We've built telephone networks that connected our voices and then our faces across long distances all over the globe. We built the internet and the cloud, which then connected the information, the applications, people, whole economies interconnected. Each of these great infrastructure waves changed the country.

Each one created winners and losers. Each one created fortunes untold. Each one created new industries that would have been almost impossible to imagine before the infrastructure existed.

And now, as America turns 250, we're building the next one. I call it the intelligence grid. It's not the data center.

It's all together. It's an intelligence grid. It's a new grid.

That may sound like a big phrase to you, but I think it fits, because what we're building is not just, as I said, a bunch of data centers. It's a lot more than GPUs. It's more than just more bigger models of Claude and Chad or other AI startups.

Those are pieces of this whole thing, but it's not the whole thing. The whole thing's the intelligence grid. What we're really building is a new layer of national and global capability, intelligence delivered through software, intelligence that can be called by an application, by a person, embedded in a workflow, attached to a business process, placed inside a developer too, placed inside a robot, exposed through an agent.

But it's woven into almost every interaction we will have. That right there, that's infrastructure. That's a grid.

We may not always recognize it as such because it doesn't look like a bridge or a railroad track or even a power line. But make no mistake, the AI build-out we're doing right now is an infrastructure build-out. The data centers, the chips, the power plants, the cooling systems, the fiber, the networks, the models, the software platforms, even the security layers, the governance system, you put them all together, and that's your new grid, the intelligence grid.

And like every grid that came before it, the real question is not only who builds it. The real question is who gets to build on top of it? And that's where history gets useful, and that's where I want to take this now.

The railroads were essential. You cannot build modern America without them. But being essential did not mean unlimited wealth forever.

Railroads were capital intensive. They were politically sensitive. They became regulated.

They had enormous power, and because of that power, the country eventually had to decide how much control any one set of companies should have over the movement of goods, people, and opportunity in our country. Electric utilities, similar thing. They became essential.

Without electrification, forget the modern economy. Our lives don't exist as we know it. But over time, electricity also became a public utility.

The companies that generated and distributed power made money, but their power profits were capped. They were regulated. They were allowed a return, but not an unlimited one.

The point was to make electricity widely available and affordable because the country understood that electricity was too important to be treated like a luxury product. It had to be ubiquitous. So where did the great fortunes from electricity come from?

Not just from selling electricity. They came from what became possible once electricity was everywhere. Appliances, manufacturing, lighting, consumer electronics, the computers we use here, industrial automation, entire new categories of products and companies that couldn't have existed before the electrical grid was there.

Another one, the internet, cloud. The companies in all of these grids that built these networks mattered, but the most explosive value, the lasting value, appeared above that infrastructure layer, above the grid. Applications, platforms, marketplaces, content commerce, software, data services.

The real magic happened when the infrastructure became available enough, reliable enough, and affordable enough that millions of peoples and companies could build these things that no one had planned in advance when the grid became ubiquitous. And that, again, is the promise of this intelligence grid that we're building here as we celebrate July 4th. But there's also a warning here, because there's another American theme we have to talk about, and that's freedom.

And the one on Digital CxO is about free as in freedom and free as in beer. I first heard that phrase years ago from my friend Ron Gula, and it stuck with me ever since. And it's a simple phrase, but there's a lot packed into it when you peel it back.

Free as in beer means something is low cost or no cost. I'm giving you free beer. You don't have to pay for it, or at least the price is so low that price isn't the access barrier, and that matters.

Price always matters. Affordability matters, especially in technology. The cheaper something becomes, the more people can experiment with it, learn it, build with it, and create businesses around it.

But free, as in freedom, that's something else, and it's something deeper. It means you can inspect it, you can modify it, you can move it, you can build with it, you can compete with it, you can fork it, you can decide for yourself. You're not locked into one vendor's roadmap or one company's pricing models, one platform's rules, or one country's gatekeeper's permission.

It's yours. No one can pull the rug out from under you. That idea helped make open source one of the most important forces in modern technology.

Open source did not win only because it was cheap. It won because it gave builders freedom. It gave enterprises options.

It gave developers agencies. And now we have to ask, what does that mean in this AI era with this intelligence grid? Because right now, AI could go either way.

On one hand, AI could become the greatest democratizing technology platform we've ever seen. It could give small companies capabilities that used to belong only to large enterprises. Everyone, people, capabilities that they couldn't imagine before.

Education, everything else. It already is helping developers build faster, help workers learn faster. It could help entrepreneurs prototype, test, sell, support, scale, build things that they would have required whole teams and couldn't have done just a few months ago, let alone years.

It could bring intelligence to every workflow in every organization. But there's another version, a dark side, if you will. In that version, intelligence becomes concentrated behind a small number of closed systems, small number of companies, a small number of people.

Every query has a token cost. Every workflow depends on a model controlled by someone else. Every agent runs through someone else's platform.

Every enterprise becomes more dependent on just a small handful of model providers, cloud providers, GPU providers, data platforms, productivity suites. That kind of concentration is what gets us all pulled away from freedom. It gets us all pulled upward into a few giant control points, choke points even.

" That's the direction that a lot of the market naturally wants to go, and a lot of these people want us to go, too. Let me be clear, I'm not anti-business. I'm a capitalist.

I'm an entrepreneur. I've spent my life building businesses, covering businesses, and cheering on, encouraging entrepreneurs. Companies should make money when they build valuable good things, and people who take risks should be rewarded for them.

Investors who fund big bets should see returns when those bets pay off. That's the American engine. That's the American dream.

That's American freedom. That's what built America. But we've also learned again and again that when a technology becomes essential to commerce and our way of life, we cannot ignore how much control sits in just too few hands.

We learned it with railroads. We learned it with utilities. We learned it with telecom.

We learned it with other and earlier industrial monopolies. We learned that markets are powerful, but markets need rules and guardrails. They've got to protect the everyday people.

We learned that innovation thrives not only when companies get big, but when new entrants still have a fair shot. And that's the conversation we need to have about AI right now. Not because intelligence and the intelligent grid is too important to put in the hands of a few.

If intelligence does indeed become the next utility, then access to intelligence will shape who can compete, who can create, who can learn, who can automate, who can defend themselves, who can reach customers, and who can participate in this next great American economy. If only the largest companies can afford that intelligence, then AI is just going to widen an already too-big gap between the giants and everyone else. If intelligence is locked into closed platforms, then innovation will happen only when the platform owners let it, and we can't allow that to happen.

If the cost of using AI remains too high, then a lot of experimentation's not going to happen. We need enterprises not to struggle with opaque rules. We need the infrastructure not to be so concentrated, so the next generation of builders have the freedom to build the next generation of greatness in this country.

That is the America we want for the next 250 years, the better version of it, the intelligence grid that creates more builders, not fewer more builders. It means model choice. It means open models have a role.

It means open source has a role. It means standards matters. It means portability matters, interoperability.

It means enterprises need leverage, not just subscriptions and tokenomics. It means developers need the ability to build across platforms. Startups need a path that doesn't require them to hand over their lifeblood, their data, and their customer relationship to someone else.

It means we need to think seriously about the physical side of this build-out, too. Data centers don't run on speeches. They need land.

They need power. They need water, chips. They need to create jobs, permanent jobs, not just temporary construction jobs.

The intelligence grid is not floating in the cloud somewhere. It's being poured in real concrete, wired into substations, cooled by massive systems, and connected by infrastructure in your community, my community, all of our communities. It does create jobs.

It does take a lot of investment. It creates opportunity. But we also know it creates strains, strains on grids, communities, water, real estate, labor, and face it, our own patience.

So let me bring it all together. As we celebrate America at 250, we should ask a very American question. Who are we building this for?

Are we building this intelligence grid so a few companies could meter intelligence back to the rest of us at whatever the market will bear? Or are we building it so a new generation of American businesses, developers, workers, students, Americans, can stand on top of it and create things we can't even yet imagine? I know which answer I prefer.

The history of America is not just a history of steel, copper, concrete, fiber, and code. It's a history of access, availability. The railroad, as I mentioned before, mattered because people and goods could move.

Electricity mattered because it reached homes and factories, even in the rural areas. Highways mattered because they opened up mobility and commerce across the country. The internet mattered because people could reach the world.

That's the lesson we should carry into AI. The intelligence grid has to be powerful. It has to be secure.

It has to be reliable. It has to be profitable enough that companies keep investing. But it also has to be accessible enough that innovation does not get trapped only at the top.

Because the real fortune of AI should not only be made by the companies that own the biggest models or data centers. The real promise is what happens when intelligence becomes available to the millions of us that could build on it, and that's when you get the unexpected. That's when you get America.

The unexpected industries, the unexpected jobs, the unexpected breakthroughs. Technology stops being some automagical and becomes part of the fabric. It happened.

It happened with the electricity. I saw it happen with the internet and the cloud, and that is what can happen with AI if we get this right. So this Fourth of July, guys, gals, enjoy the fireworks, enjoy the barbecue, enjoy the long weekend.

We should celebrate. America's made it to 250 years, and it's no small thing. But once the fireworks fade, we have work to do.

The next great American build is already underway. The intelligence grid is being built right now. The question is whether it will expand freedom or narrow freedom, whether it will create more opportunity or concentrate it, whether it will give the next generation of builders a foundation to stand on or another gate they have to get through.

America's first 250 years were powered by the freedom to build. In the next 250, we need to make sure that freedom survives. Happy Fourth of July.

Happy 250, America. This is Alan Shimel, and that's what Shimmy Says.