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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

This is software developing a transfer market like footballers, isn't it? We've still got a long way to catch up with Ronaldo.

In both cases this is driven by "tournament wages": you can't replace Ronaldo with any number of cheaper footballers, because the size of your team is limited and the important metric is beating the other team.

It's also interesting to contrast this with the "AI will replace programmers" rhetoric. It sounds like the compensation curve is going to get steeper and steeper.

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The curve is getting steeper, yes. That's not a contrast to the "AI will replace programmers" rhetoric.

Steeper means: higher at the top. Lower on the bottom.

Right now, AI can do the job of the bottom large percentage of programmers better than those programmers. Look up how a disruptive S-curve works. At the end, we may be left with one programmer overseeing an AI "improving" itself. Or perhaps zero. Or perhaps one per project. We don't know yet.

Good analogue is automation. Mass-scale manufacturing jobs were replaced by a handful of higher-paid, higher-skilled jobs. Certain career classes disappeared entirely.

> you can't replace Ronaldo with any number of cheaper footballers

Of course you can. It's a team game. Having Ronaldo wearing your team's shirt doesn't guarantee a win. So a team of 11 cheaper footballers with a better plan and coaching has often beat whatever team Ronaldo plays on. "Cheaper" != "cheap" of course; they're still immensely talented and well-paid athletes.

What I mean is there's only eleven slots on the field. You can't swap one star player for a hundred mediocre ones. It's worth seeing which industries do and don't work like that.

The "I trained a trillion parameter model" club is a very small club.

> We've still got a long way to catch up with Ronaldo.

Pretty sure Alexsandr Wang just blew Ronaldo out of the water.

Before that, the WhatsApp/Instagram founders.

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