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Comment by VladVladikoff | Hacker News Reader

I replaced a $22/hr worker entirely with AI. And it costs me about $0.18/hr instead. The AI does a better job, is more reliable and consistent. The human was constantly behind schedule, made frequent mistakes, and also humans get sick, or call off work for other reasons.

So yes, AI is a bubble, but this bubble has generated value, it’s not at all like 2008.

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$0.18/hr is the (massively) subsidized price of AI services. Once these companies are required to turn a profit for their investors, they'll raise the price. Then the math doesn't look so lopsided. We're already seeing this process unfold with token windows and ad rollout.

It's not that subsidised, this is just wishful thinking. You can run a local model like Qwen for equivalent prices. You might see it go up to $0.50/hr but you're definitely not going to see it at $22

I do run open models locally, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking that they're functionally competitive. I'm extremely skeptical of anybody claiming they've obviated a $22/hr job with an open model. Qwen is a big step down in capability. I can play with something like k2.5 for awhile, but if I want real work done I'm going back to a frontier model, which has significant runtime requirements for inference.

You're also ignoring the cost of purchasing and amortizing dedicated hardware in your local model example.

It's not an apples-to-apples comparison.

Inference isn't really that expensive, its the training of new foundational models that is. With whatever highly optimized setup the big providers are using, they should be able to pack quite a lot of concurrent users onto a deployment of a model. Just think too, it's very possible their use case would be served just fine by a 100B model deployed to a $4,000 DGX Spark.

Just curious, what did your human worker do that you were able to entirely automate?

My bet is something administrative, like reminding people to approve their timesheets for payroll. AI wouldn't be needed to replace that job though, just a recurring calendar event.

Reviewing of images and video that is uploaded to my website.

I too, want to hear details about what this person did that they could be replaced completely with LLMs.

Reviewing of images and video that is uploaded to my website.

The value is negative to that worker, apparently.

Society on the whole, but this isn’t the first time I have automated away jobs, I have been doing it for years long before we had LLMs every where. In my opinion it is the only way to sustainably grow a company. Identify your biggest man hour costs and find a way to automate away those tasks.

Society as a whole is those workers. Capital, efficiency, GDP and similar things may be sky high, but the actual people will suffer.

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