Zyaku Founder Argues AI Will Worsen, Not Fix, The Internet's Attention Problem

SAN FRANCISCO - July 23, 2026 - PRLog -- Rohit Kashyap, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Zyaku Inc., has published an essay arguing that artificial intelligence is likely to intensify, rather than resolve, one of the internet's longest-running structural problems: the imbalance between an ever-growing supply of content and a fixed supply of human attention.

The essay, titled "The Biggest Lie in Tech Isn't That Users Are the Product," challenges the widely repeated claim that free internet products turn their users into the product being sold. Kashyap argues instead that the actual product being monetized across the technology industry has always been human attention itself, and that platform design over the past two decades, including notifications, autoplay, and recommendation algorithms, has been optimized primarily to capture more of it.

Kashyap introduces the term "Attention Inflation" to describe a dynamic he expects to intensify as AI lowers the cost of content production toward zero. Drawing a comparison to monetary inflation, he argues that as AI-generated articles, videos, images, and audio flood platforms in growing volume, each individual piece of content will command a smaller share of a fixed amount of daily human attention, regardless of its quality.

The essay proposes that the competitive advantage in technology is shifting from content creation to content curation, and introduces a second term, the "Decision Economy," to describe what Kashyap believes will replace the current attention economy. Under this framing, platforms would compete on their ability to help users decide what deserves their attention, rather than on their ability to maximize the volume of content produced or consumed.

The piece also proposes alternative metrics for technology companies to report publicly, including hours of unnecessary content removed, decisions simplified for users, and measurable wellbeing impact, as a contrast to standard industry metrics such as daily active users and average session length.

"The next generation of internet companies won't be remembered because they generated the most content," Kashyap writes in the essay. "They'll be remembered because they helped people navigate a world overflowing with it."

Kashyap connects the argument to his work at Zyaku, a creator platform he has been developing, stating that the company's product decisions are guided by the question of whether a feature improves a person's overall relationship with the internet, rather than by engagement metrics alone.

The full essay is available on Medium. Further information about Zyaku is available at zyaku.com.

LINKS

1. https://medium.com/@rohit.kashyap_53123/the-biggest-lie-i...
2. https://zyaku.com