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Comment by Jtarii | Hacker News Reader

Companies that use AI well will replace the companies that use AI badly. There is no world in which AI is not used extensively in all employment going forward.

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I agree, with the caveat that I don’t think any company is using AI well at the moment, specifically because I think our tooling around AI is woefully inadequate and immature.

Right now the AI marketing paradigm is to create rockstar superusers who can (supposedly) do the job of hundreds of individuals at the speed of light! Which bleeds into the design paradigm, which is trash. I’m bullish on AI that can be used more cooperatively and collectively by a company.

Right now LLMs are heavily subsidized. When that ends, the actual cost of the service may exceed its usefulness for many use cases.

I'm less sure of the fact that ending subsidized token consumption (in isolation) will happen and change this. I think we've seen this play out before with other tech companies where discounting early use ends up entrenching demand and allowing the company to build larger and more efficient infrastructure.

I'm slightly _more_ convinced (still not all that strongly) that the rising cost of memory and chips, data center construction that gets outpaced by computing demand, increasing energy costs, and low switching costs for customers will force the model labs to make changes that increase the barrier to entry (either via higher pricing, more restrictive rate limiting, etc.). or force their customers into longer term commitments.

> I think we've seen this play out before with other tech companies where discounting early use ends up entrenching demand and allowing the company to build larger and more efficient infrastructure.

We've also seen failures who were convinced "they would make it up in volume." I guess the bet is that infra will get that much more efficient, but it's not clear how much slack there is.

A lot - and over the coming 2 years, even more. Utilization rates are under 50% across the board, and special and cheaper chips are coming out all the time for inference. And a truckload of research - TurboQuant, HC (deepseek), etc, etc..

Computation halves in price every ~2 years so maybe in the short term but not in the long term

How is that possible when the cost of memory and hard drives have gone up 3x+ in the last six months? Maybe cheaper if you're OAI or one of the lucky companies Nvidia is propping up. Everyone else is getting screwed.

Sorry but I don't really see how this contradicts what I said in context i.e. both our statements are compatible in the context of what I was replying to

Even so, frontier models get bigger and more complicated, and agentic workflows consume exponentially more tokens than the simple chat windows of two years ago.

I agree that the amount people pay for these services is very unlikely to decrease (i.e. Blinn's Law but for tokens). Still, the current level of "intelligence" will eventually become available for a very low price almost surely. Really I simply don't see how you can disagree with the parent's comment "There is no world in which AI is not used extensively in all employment going forward." Honestly I'd like to understand the mindset, is it mainly that you dislike working with these tools/hope they don't get imposed on you or did you actually find them harmful in your work in some way and think they are overvalued?

You've somehow confused using AI well with using it extensively.

Sometimes using something well involves not using it at all.

not using it at all is no longer an option, companies that are not using it at all will die slow/fast death but death nonetheless.

Ironically, companies overusing it will probably die at a similar speed. Maybe faster, even, depending whether cash burn or technical debt catches up to them first.

100%

That's just a baseless assumption. To use AI well you should do the things that allow you to use stuff well. You shouldn't just use it any way you can because you assume that 'not using it at all' is not the best option.

This is literally the same with every single technological development.

> This is literally the same with every single technological development.

yup, there are a lot of successful companies today not using the internet :)

What's the LLM equivalent to email and a basic webpage?

https://noqta.tn/en/news/polsia-ai-autonomous-company-30m-fu...

$1m ARR in 30 days :)

I was expecting more like a minimal usage that makes sense for a butchery or something, not get rid of the people using email.

That's like saying farmers that don't use pesticides will die out. There's whole industries around doing things not the way big companies say you have to. Human-centric firms will pop up and proposer.

Maybe. But I used to have unlimited Claude Code usage but now I’m relegated to whatever the subscription happens to give me and when I run out of tokens I need to trad code until my limits reset. My manager saw the bill and nearly fell out of his chair. Small companies just can’t afford the added cost of AI at the real price (and we aren’t even in the real price territory yet).

Hell, even Microsoft is having trouble paying Anthropic’s API rates.

There is a ceiling to how much people are willing to pay for work slop. Just look at the backlash to GitHub Copilot’s token based billing changes.

I don’t want to live in a world where the barrier to entry on entrepreneurship is how much you can pay Anthropic or OpenAI.

The copilot token pricing is going to wake a lot of companies up. Even with our smaller company only using around 1/3 of our allotted requests, next month the bill will easily twice as much.

If by "using AI well" you mean kill off customer service; maybe customers will want to switch to other companies that are more expensive but have customer service.

Say the line, Bart!

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