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Comment by tuom1s | Hacker News Reader

What will happen when AI companies increase the price of tokens?

The code produced will only be understandable by AI. You could use locally hosted LLMs, but it won't be as performant as AI run by big guys. And there is nothing stopping greedy companies implementing some ridiculous pattern that only their model can reasonably work with.

So what you'll do in situation when you can't understand "your" codebase and you have to make changes or fix a bug?

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Eventually I would bet on ai using its own non human readable languages (brains?) to program in to reduce overhead.

It will be a black box, and the code will be generated just in time by ai for each api request

If the language is unreadable for humans, we really can't trust that it does what it claims to do, except by testing. This requires more trust in the system than is warranted IMO. You can never be sure that there's no "sleeper" logic waiting to get activated. See "Reflections on Trusting Trust" by Ken Thompson. If we build systems that start relying on opaque mechanisms, it seems to be only a matter of time before things start behaving in ways contrary to what their authors intended, with no clear way to stop it other than hitting the power button, if that's even possible at that point.

What happens when the price of tokens goes to 0?

The open weight models are nipping on the heels of frontier models. The frontier labs have to make forward progress and keep tokens cheap in order to maintain marketshare.

Eventually, we'll have a Mythos-level model running on integrated hardware on every PC.

Are you ready to bet your future on this ?

That is a pricing problem. And it is an absolute risk. That doesn’t change AI’s potential to be a better coder than 98-100% of everyone.

I think this is going to happen sooner than most people think.

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