We didn’t think « damn, tony stark didn’t have to write a line of code, he got rendered obsolete by this damn AI ». That’s how i choose to think about AI tools for developers from now on.
There's also a small little thing called competition. When your competitors use AI, your job just got harder.
What’s more likely is that someone like a Microsoft will make it part of their cloud offerings so devs like us can build things on top.
Why try to capture every market when you can build tools and take percentages of the rest of the economy?
If you have a technology with practically zero marginal cost, pricing it very low and distributing it widely would maximize your profit. Not to mention that once its out of the bag, others will know that its possible and copy it.
[0] https://newatlas.com/vertu-ti-luxury-10000-dollar-android-sm...
This is just fundamentally not true or else all software would be sold for next to nothing. If a company is choosing between selling a billion copies of its software for $1 each or two copies of its software for $1b dollars each, it will choose to set the price at $1b.
The sky-high potential of AGI means that a few very rich people/companies will be willing to pay an enormous amount of money to have a monopoly on the technology. That means the profit maximizing approach might be to put a huge price tag on the product.
Yes, that was exactly the point that vasco was worrying about earlier in the thread since we don't yet know if it will be competitive market. I was refuting the point that price is dictated by marginal cost. It is dictated by the level of competition. If there is competition, we generally wouldn't have to worry about it only being available to billionaires.
How much have you spent on purchasing software this year?
For the past 15 years, pretty much 100% of the code running on my personal laptop and work desktop is opensource. The few remaining non-opensource programs, such as UEFI and wifi firmware, came free of charge with the hardware.
The only software I directly purchased in this decade are videogames on Steam, and that's closer to purchasing artwork than a computer program.
As a salaried employee, there isn't much software out there that can either increase my income or decrease my expenses, so most of my personal software purchases end up being for leisure. However, software does provide tremendous value to my employer. As a result, they are willing to spend millions on it annually.
In the example of selling an AGI product, why bother selling it to me for whatever the maximum price I could afford? I'm not going to put a mortgage on the house to buy it because it won't allow me to maximize income by working 10 salaried positions or anything like that. But my employer could save millions with it and therefore they would be willing to spend millions to buy it.
I work with tooling that costs on the order of $100k/seat. We don't get many add-ons, or it would be worse. You don't seem to understand how industrial software works. Negotiations involve the vendor figuring out how much your company is worth, and charging the largest fraction of that possible. The number of vendors in a niche is extremely small and they all work the same way.
A few billion.
I bought a licence to Windows source code and paid developers to remove tracking so that I can have an OS with functional UX and privacy.
I bought Google search, removed ads, banned all the SEO spam from AdWords and now I can finally have a functional seatch experience.
I'm 100% open source at home as well and I'd say we are a tiny minority. No job that I've had was open source-centric so you have me beat there.
> The few remaining non-opensource programs, such as UEFI and wifi firmware, came free of charge with the hardware.
Nothing comes free of charge with hardware. The price was included with the hardware. Did you pay for your smartphone? Or you get that free?
> The only software I directly purchased in this decade are videogames on Steam, and that's closer to purchasing artwork than a computer program.
You bought ( leased ) software. Doesn't matter how you want to rationalize it to fit your argument.
Sure, you can make up numbers and have it say whatever you want.
> The sky-high potential of AGI means that a few very rich people/companies will be willing to pay an enormous amount of money to have a monopoly on the technology. That means the profit maximizing approach might be to put a huge price tag on the product.
Even if you have a monopoly, your profit maximizing quantity is determined by where marginal revenue matches marginal cost. Then you charge as much as you can to sell that quantity. Everything else would lead you to a worse profit. You could have whacky looking demand curves, and yes it will result in a higher price and lower quantity than perfect competition, but the profit maximizing outcome will almost certainly be a wide distribution. Unless there is some weird negative network effect where someone gets benefit from others not having it. But in general, as a greedy business man, you want to be selling shovels during the gold rush.
To summarize, low marginal cost means high quantity, means relatively low price. That's why an insanely useful product like Microsoft office sells for something like $70 a year or $99 for a family plan. Slightly more for business but considering so much of the world is run on their software its an incredible bargain
http://pressbooks.oer.hawaii.edu/microeconomics2019/wp-conte...
Yes, and we established that the marginal cost is near zero so the profit maximization strategy depends entirely on the shape of the demand curve. AGI isn’t going to have a linear demand curve because it’s value to me is not proportional to its value to a billionaire. The curve with have an exponential shape and therefore setting a higher price can potentially yield more profit than a lower price.
Companies regularly pool resources to share the cost of building technology, and they regularly do it for competitive reasons.
Kubernetes, for example, is an open source public good that splits its development costs between several companies. By sharing the runtime code as open source, the cost for any one cloud provider to build a competitive Kubernetes offering goes down. Google built it to compete with AWS’ offerings.
The edge I see these AI companies potentially having is data to train or knowledge how – not money.
Deployment has to be done on a large scale to recuperate the training costs. You can't hide it. By having API access the model discloses its abilities and can even be used to improve the training set of your competition.
And models are compact, you can put SD on a DVD, but the original training set was 100,000 times larger. You can train a 13B language model from 1T tokens. You can download, save and share a GPT4 but you can't "download a Google" (remember what happened to the LLaMA model and 4chan). AI models are self contained pieces of data and code.
So my conclusion is that AI will spread wide and reverse the centralisation trend we have had in the last 20 years.
So Iron Man was born, and Stark flew away with his humming arc reactor in his chest. [2]
He looks incredibly youthful for being around 80. I guess that hum in his chest keeps him young.
[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Iron-Man-comic-book-charact...
I hope that we get there, but it won't happen by default.
These LLMs aren't inherently complicated to implement, just expensive to train. And if the LLaMA release/leak is anything to go by we are extremely close to ChatGPT running on consumer hardware.
So maybe everyone can have their own Jarvis, but theirs won't be hooked up to a factory. I guess it can help them forage for food and remind them that their rent is past due. But that's not an appealing future.
If you’ve ever watched Stuff Made Here on youtube, imagine people inventing things like that on a mass scale. That’s a future I want to live in, the pace of technological progress would be staggering.
If that's the criteria, AI and 3D printing are superfluous. What are they contributing?
To me it illustrates that if you have money and want to build something, you don’t need to hire coders or have any coding skills, AI will help.
And if you’re a regular coder, you just got replaced by Jarvis.
And, so, if we get Jarvis level AI, and you will get rendered obsolete.
When these tools come, inheriting billionaires will hire 10 people with Tony Stark intelligence as opposed to 10,000 devs with your level of intelligence.
So, don't be in denial that you will be made obsolete.
(And probably so will I.)
Because it's a movie.
In reality an AI like that would be more important than all the other nonsense. But it wouldn't be fun to watch an AI easily unravel the mysteries of magic, time travel, multiverse, etc.
I was watching one of the movies and Stark was flying around some baddie castle/base. He tells Jarvis to locate all the missile placements and, when that's done, he tells Jarvis to target them.
That was when I thought, "oh, he's just a middle manager now" and lost interest.
I'm less concerned that AI tools will replace developers in the short term, and more concerned that it will encourage incompetent management to try their hand at "contributing" to projects using AI tools, creating more headaches for the developers. Kind of like how Blackberries made managers feel super productive firing off emails, while adding significantly to the work load of those under them.
but i support your optimism because what else are we gonna do