AI 2.0 needs a threesome

By Alan Jacobson, Systems Architect & Analyst

Settle down, Beavis. It’s a threesome with a librarian, a cop and an accountant: memory, governance and revenue.

I know it’s not the ménage à trois you were hoping for, but this is serious business.

Let’s do the numbers:

By naming Web 2.0, Tim O’Reilly revealed a shift the industry was already living through but couldn’t yet articulate.

AI is at that same moment right now.

AI 1.0 is brilliant, astonishing, history-making.

And it is also fundamentally broken.

Before we define what comes next, we need to remember how the web got its reboot — because AI today looks exactly like the web did in 2003.

🌐 Web 1.0 → Web 2.0: The last time the world rebooted itself

Web 1.0 (1993–2003)
Before identity, transactions and retail

In practice, Web 1.0 was:

static, read-only pages
limited or untrusted SSL
credit-card fear and friction
unreliable or nonexistent ecommerce
no user identity
no personalization
no social layer
no participation

It was a directory, not a marketplace.
A brochure rack, not a social platform.

Web 2.0 didn’t improve the Web. It rewired the world.

Two revolutions emerged — each massive and irreversible.

Web 2.0 moved retail online

As soon as the architecture changed — identity, participation, interaction — retail flipped:

secure transactions
trusted SSL
persistent identity
dynamic carts
product reviews
recommendation engines
two-day shipping
personalized storefronts

Traditional retail collapsed.
Digital retail exploded.

Brick-and-mortar stores died.
Online retail became the default.

Web 2.0 didn’t change retail. It replaced it.

This was only possible because Web 2.0 introduced:

identity
real-time updates
user-generated content
feeds
social graphs
notifications
comments
continuous participation

That architecture birthed…

Facebook (2004)
YouTube (2005)
Twitter (2006)
Reddit (2005)
LinkedIn (2003)
Tumblr (2007)

Social interaction moved online permanently. A new societal layer was born.

AI 1.0: Extraordinary — and unsustainable

AI 1.0 is a marvel that cannot survive at scale. It is:

stateless
amnesiac
unpredictable
hallucination-prone
unverifiable
unauditable
non-deterministic
fragile under load
non-compliant
unregulated and unregulatable
lacking identity
lacking continuity
lacking receipts
financially incoherent
burning compute indiscriminately
unable to distinguish high-value input from noise
unable to justify resource consumption

AI 1.0 is a genius with no memory, no discipline, no receipts, no budget and no accountability.

Just as Web 1.0 collapsed under its limitations, AI 1.0 is collapsing under its own weight – just listen to top CEOs and look at the data.

Introducing AI 2.0 and its three secret agents

They’re “secret” only because the industry has been too focused on compute and benchmarks — but they’re the real operators behind AI’s future. And like Charlie’s Angels, these agents do their work behind the scenes — unseen, underestimated and absolutely essential.

Web 2.0 required three architectural breakthroughs – identity, participation, platforms – to become the world’s operating system.

AI 2.0 requires its own three agents:

Memory
Governance
Revenue

These are the operators shaping the next era of AI.

Agent 1: Memory

AI must remember to remember.

This is the transformation from:

stateless → stateful
ephemeral → continuous
disposable → persistent

Memory enables:

personalization
continuity
identity-aware interaction
cross-session coherence
multi-step reasoning
tool-use consistency

Memory is the prerequisite for intelligence.

Agent 2: Governance

AI must be predictable, auditable, and verifiable.

Governance is:

verifiable outputs
governed routing
predictable refusals
transparent escalation
domain boundaries
receipts
accountability

Governance is not censorship — it is reliability.

Agent 3: Revenue

AI must have a sustainable economic model.

AI 1.0 is priced like a casino — tokens in, money out, chaos everywhere.

AI 2.0 requires:

fixed-price access (like broadband)
token metering (like APIs)
FLOP-based metering (actual compute cost)
rational budgets
vertical alignment

Without sustainable economics, nothing scales.

Web 2.0 didn’t improve the web —
it transformed the economy and rewired human society.

AI 2.0 won’t improve chatbots —
it will redefine the architecture of intelligence.

Systems built by these three agents will survive.

Systems trapped in AI 1.0 will not.

Three agents. One mission. Impossible? Inevitable.