Comment by dsa3a | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dsa3a | Hacker News Reader

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Out of curiosity... why do you think this?

I think this is complete madness. Im not someone that is in a job so I have the luxury to think critically about what is going on and... I just dont see it.

What I see is that LLMs will complement Labour and the excess returns of model producers will be very minimal (if at all any) due to the intense competition - keeping switching costs to a minimum (close to zero). This is before mentioning open source models which I expect to continue to improve.

There is no specialisation re. models at this moment in time so it is very likely to be the case.

OAI and Anthropic have to generate enough after-tax cash flows from operations to cover their reinvestment needs to continue going on. If they can't cover reinvestment then they will obviously lose as their offering will not be competitive.

There's no certainty they generate this amount of cash profits either. They still have a high chance of going bust, of course that gets lower - IF - they can keep ramping up revenues.

No. I assure you. The cost of retaining labor + AI access to augment them further is far less desirable than downsize, then augment cheaper laborers to bring the quality approximately up to the old headcount. This is exec math, and execs get paid on how much value goes to shareholders, not to keep people employed.

How about the economic impact of all the over investments in AI? It’ll all be dumped on us all Im afraid.

Thats a separate issue. lets stick to the issue re. labour

Labor looks like it’s going to become more and more commoditized and AI will turbocharge all that.

what do you think is going to happen to the general laborer market when all that money goes bye-bye?

I've reread your post a few times and I can't make heads or tails of it. I don't even disagree with anything you've said, it just seems like a total non-sequitur; nothing you've said gives any reason to disbelieve that AI will put (many) people out of work.

Sounds like you have a gap of knowledge and understanding if you're not getting it.

If you can't explain your idea, I doubt it possesses any merit. A commoditization of AI as you're describing does not in any way rule out mass unemployment.

I think what you’re describing is a more general race to the bottom where everyone loses, including the AI companies.

This won’t happen because the AI companies will collude to prevent it from happening, meaning they’ll drop out of that race leaving the rest of us to claim victory.

Generous of them, really.

No Im not describing a race to the bottom. Im saying that its in Google's best interest to ensure Anthropic and OAI do not continue to operate as a going concern and generate enough cash flows to finance reinvestment - by providing a very competitive offering.

Price of tokens is one competitive-instrument for them to achieve that but not the only one - they offer a whole lot more to enterprises that OAI and Anthropic don't.

By doing so Anthropic and OAI's valuations go crashing into the ground along with future prospects of raising funding externally.

Yes. They won't become genuinely important themselves, but they will still upset the balance between workers and capital owners, creating a more extreme situation that we have now.

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