20VC Partner Compares AI Token to the Aluminum Industry, Suggests Agent AI Could Unlock Unlimited Market

Huo Xing Finance reports that P_Bonnet, partner at 20VC, published an article drawing an analogy between the aluminum industry’s history and AI, exploring a “if everything goes well” scenario. Most supply shortages turn into surpluses within 3–5 years, destroying value—but aluminum took over a century to achieve a price decline of over 99.9% and a market expansion of more than 1,000 times, because each price reduction unlocked new applications rather than causing collapse within the same market. AI tokens are now climbing the same cost curve at roughly 10 times the speed. The critical milestone is when humans are no longer the limiting factor. Conversational AI is constrained by human reading speeds and user base size, whereas reasoning and agents can make the consumer no longer human; agentic AI may completely remove human limits, leaving only rapidly improving cost and utility. Aluminum also relied on process breakthroughs to transform a cheap metal into a structural material. At the infrastructure level, Alcoa monopolized the market for decades through proprietary processes, owned mines, and controlled power; Nvidia possesses accumulated process advantages like CUDA, but its capacity is more like leased capacity, and it lacks direct control over power—major customers have already locked in nuclear power and are developing their own chips. Ultimately, value will cascade to those who discover new applications impossible at previous price levels; price collapse, technological effectiveness, and capital migration are not opposing forces—they are the same outcome.