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I think "software is a gas" is the better explanation. ("Software always expands to fit whatever container it is stored in")

Microsoft has enough engineer-hours on hand to make snappy UIs if they wanted to, but it's just not a priority for them. More/cheaper engineer hours doesn't really change that prioritization.

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Microsoft would hire a ton more engineers and look very different if engineer price went to ~zero. So what does that look like? If you can make an app snappy with $100 in GPU time, why wouldn’t they?

Because they'd rather spend that $100 in GPU time on adding a new feature. Repeat that a few times and now your app is 10x more complex and costs 1000x more to perf-optimise.

The hypothetical is only interesting if we draw a distinction between easy and hard tasks. (“AI can do anything a human can do behind a keyboard” is AGI complete.) For this hypothetical I asserted that performance optimization and porting were automatable, but that doesn’t include any feature.

If you think there’s a more interesting/realistic/well-defined assumption, please suggest it!

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