HumanX 2026
Notes from a Conference
HumanX 2026 drew 6,500 people to San Francisco. When civilians start showing up to AI conferences the way they showed up to crypto conferences means the game has changed.
The sharpest framing of the entire conference came early. There are now two types of companies. The first type treats agentic workflows, token optimization, and headcount as equally important operational inputs they've internalized AI as infrastructure, not tooling. The second type is still running "AI strategy" workshops and waiting for someone to tell them what to do.
The gap between these two categories is compounding quarterly. A company that's already integrated agents into its deployment pipeline doesn't just save 15% on engineering costs it learns faster, ships faster, iterates faster. The learning rate itself accelerates.
Jensen framed AI's infrastructure story in four words tokens per watt. Every data center, every chip architecture, every cooling system is now co-designed around this single metric.
We've spent a decade optimizing for FLOPS. We're now entering an era where the binding constraint isn't raw compute it's the energy required to generate inference at scale.
Consider the numbers: Together AI reported growth from 10 billion tokens per day in early 2025 to over 5 trillion tokens per day by April 2026. That's three orders of magnitude on a single platform in roughly a year. When I heard that number I had to sit with it for a minute. 5 trillion tokens a day. The entire written output of human civilization is estimated at maybe 100 trillion words total. One inference platform is processing 5% of that daily.
The implication is that flat rate pricing is dead. Sam Altman was cited repeatedly across multiple panels as the clearest voice signaling that usage based, metered pricing is where consumer and enterprise AI is headed. Power is scarce, inference demand is exploding, and subsidizing unlimited usage is a money losing proposition at every scale. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google they're all going to move to consumption pricing, and the companies that build
Life is like a call option you know the downside, but the upside is infinite. The question is whether you're writing the option or buying it. After three days at HumanX, I'm more certain than ever that building is buying. Everything else is selling.
The bottleneck is not capability. It's trust.