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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?

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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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