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Comment by heavyset_go | Hacker News Reader

As the rate of profit drops, value needs to be squeezed out of somewhere and that will come from the hiring/firing and compensation of labor, hence a strong bias towards that outcome.

99% of the draw of AI is cutting labor costs, and hiring goes against that.

That said, I don't believe AI productivity claims, just pointing out a factor that could theoretically contribute to your hypothetical.

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Maybe if you have a business where the need for software is a constant, so it’s great to get it for 90% off. (It’s not clear what business that is in 2025, maybe a small plumbing contractor?)

But if your business is making software it’s hard to argue you only need a constant amount of software. I’ve certainly never worked at a software company where the to-do list was constant or shrinking!

If you expect input cost for something that's mostly labour to go dramatically down, then you also fear the value of your product crashing.

At the end of the day economy is king. Nothing else matters. But economy is not something you can plan and predict (shout out to my communist friends), it is a chaotic system full of emergent elements, chance-based actors and third-order effects and so it usually takes years for trends and patterns to emerge. All I'm going to say is that unless AI keeps improving exponentially (and there's definitely an argument to be made that it's not already) there is going to be a hell to pay a few years down the road.

I use Grok, Claude and Gemini every day, these "tools" are very useful to me (in the sense of how google and wikipedia changed the game) and I watch the LLM space closely, but what I'm seeing in terms of relative improvement is far removed from all the promises of the CEOs of these companies... Like, Grok 4 was supposed to be "close to AGI" but compared to Grok 3 it's just a small incremental improvement and the same goes for others...

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