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Comment by NinjaTrance | Hacker News Reader

The possibility that anyone can easily replicate any startup scares A16Z.

This is what always confused me about VC AI enthusiasm. Their moat is the capital. As AI improves, it destroys their moat. And yet, they are stoked to invest in it, the architects of their own demise.

Don't you have that backwards? If AI gets so good that it can replace all human labor, will capital like money and data centers be the only moat left?

> If AI gets so good that it can replace all human labor, will capital like money and data centers be the only moat left?

If AI gets good enough to replace all human labor then actual physical moats to keep the hungry, rioting replaced humans away will be the most important moats.

Which is bought by money in the first place, see billionaire doomsday bunkers. The poor will not have such a bunker.

Unless they intend on generating their own oxygen to breathe, I don't see how these bunkers stand a chance.

Fortunately they do.

For how many weeks? Or months? Or years? Then what?

Did you see those Chinese robots from last week? I’m pretty sure they’ve got their moats covered

How powerful is the device you wrote this comment from? On prem or self hosted affordable inference is inevitable.

Money is useful mostly for hiring human labor to outcompete others, e.g. Satya Nadella has 100K employees under his command, you don't, so you can't realistically compete with MS today - this is their main moat.

If AI renders human labor a cheap commodity (say you can orchestrate a bunch of agents to develop + market a Windows competitor for $1000 of compute), what used to be "Satya + his army vs. you" now becomes mostly a 1:1 fair fight, which favors the startup.

Frankly, you have a pretty good chance of displacing windows right now. You should go for it.

There’s no alternative, they can’t collectively freeze out all AI investment and force it to die.

I don’t know about that. I’ve looked at things like the rise of AI protects those who currently have capital. They won’t need labor or as much of it. So maybe it is what they want - to retain power permanently. Isn’t that the tech oligarch Curtis Yarvin fantasy - to replace democracy with themselves as a permanent ruling class?

The incompetent have always pantomimed the competent. It never works. Although the incompetent will always pay a huge amount to try to achieve this fantasy.

You're joking. Most startups are the incompetent. Throwing enough money at sales and marketing can make anything work.

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