Why Menlo exists
We believe AI is the new electricity. It’s silent utility that will power every decision the way current once powered every lamp and motor.
In every age, a new utility rewires how people live together. 1879, Menlo Park : Edison lights one street and flips the clock on human productivity. Night shifts, electrified factories, cities that never sleep. Each followed in quick succession.
A century later, whole regions leap past copper lines and go straight to mobile broadband , proving that the places with the least to lose often gain the most.
Today the baton passes again. The current is artificial intelligence. Its conductors are data and silicon, not copper and coal. And, like electricity in 1879, AI is terrible at one thing: explaining itself.
Why AI is the Next Electricty
Electricity reshaped the world because it combined three traits: it was universal (every industry could use it), invisible (it vanished into walls and wires), and deflationary (each kilowatt got cheaper the more we produced)
AI shows the same signature:
- Universal: Any task that weighs options or patterns—from crop forecasts to drug discovery—can fold in machine intelligence.
- Invisible: Models sink into apps and devices until “smart” feels like air‑conditioning, noticed only when it fails.
- Deflationary : The cost to train a state‑of‑the‑art model has fallen 1000‑fold in five years.³ One GPU cluster now serves a continent.
Electricity electrified every industry. It gave us refrigeration, radio, microchips. AI will turn every decision predictive. It will hand us tools we haven’t named yet but will soon call essential.
Where Menlo stands
Many of us grew up far from the glass towers and venture corridors that shaped yesterday’s web. We’ve built products in places where the power blinks at noon and broadband rides a rooftop antenna. In those neighbourhoods:
- The next school is still an empty lot
- The next clinic is one room with paper charts
- The next supply chain is a motorbike and a spreadsheet
Here, leapfrog is how people get things done. AI lets us skip missing layers and create systems that start efficient instead of ending there. Menlo turns those workarounds into infrastructure so teachers, nurses, and merchants get a utility as dependable as the power grid.
An open invitation
If you’d rather help rewire the next streets than polish the last chandeliers, join us. Test with us, challenge us, build with us.
- Careers – Build with us
- Events – Meet the community
- GitHub – Contribute code and ideas
- Newsletter - Follow the strategy behind what we’re building
Menlo Research: making intelligence as ordinary, and as empowering—as switching on a light.