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Comment by palmotea | Hacker News Reader

> Sorry that's no realistic. People start businesses, including law firms, all the time with little to no capital.

You're clinging past: what you is true when human capital counts for something, but what happens when it doesn't? Where the party who can spend the most tokens on the case wins (or has a much greater chance of success)?

Law might not be the best example of that, but (under current trends) a lot of areas will be.

> Your asserting AI makes the economy more capital intensive, when I think you'll see in practice it's the opposite.

You're claiming AI will make the economy more labor intensive? Huh?

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Sounds like Jevons Paradox to me: Amount of output per worker-hour increases(cost drops edit sorry), paradoxically worker-hours _increase_.

Mechanism? New Use Cases become viable.

Just like LED lights and Virtual Machines made light-per-watt and workloads-per-server more efficient, what did we do with that efficiency? We didn't pocket the cash, we turned every billboard and many buildings into JumboTrons, and we made millions of new cheap cloud VMs to run hundreds of thousands of new little businesses that never would have happened.

Look at coding now: People are finishing side projects that they never would have, closing out old bugs or test coverage they never would have, starting side businesses they never would have before.

This is new demand being created before our eyes as the cost of knowledge work drops.

You can not have done any calculus on cloud costs? Capex -> opex is the only thing they fix. But the costs are way higher.

> what happens when it doesn't?

It will never happen. Capitalism works when consumers can choose the best service provider. When there is only one universal service provide (AI), behind various "fronts", it would be catastrophic.

And all the consumers lose catastrophically.

So there should be at least some human component to differentiate between the various "AI" providers.

That’s a should, what makes it a will? Capitalism can just be killed by AI.

But if the AIs learn from the business (at some point they need to) then the differentiator get's absorbed back. If you figure out how to optimize your AI/humanoid robot, that benefit you have only lasts until the next AI model that incorporates your successes.

But LLMs does not learn/train like that. They need the same thing repeated a gazillion times in the their training data to actually use it in inference.

So unless this human element get absorbed widely into literature, then I think the scenario you present is not possible, at least in the context of current LLMs.

May be there will be true AI in future, that can read a fact and grasp it brilliance, like a human do, and use it in answering future questions. Then what you said could be possible.

I'm assuming for it to work at the level of filling rolls in businesses like this they will need to generate synthetic data to train on from onsite data, which will be the best practices of you and your competitors and hence include the corpus of what makes you better/lean compared to your competitor and remove differentiators.

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