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Comment by mystraline | Hacker News Reader

The underlying capitalist problem is that dumping is not just permitted, but expected as a business strategy. Except dumping is usually exporting to another country to kill their industry.

Instead, this dumping is exporting "thinking" to destroy humans' innate thoughts, get them hooked, then rugpull for 3x the cost. Cause just over 1 year of LLMs, takes a developer who could reverse engineer a thing, to now needing help to construct a for loop.

Thats why I run my own LLMs. Hard to rugpull what you own and control. And thats also why I focus on questions not of "do this", but "explain this". I seek to use LLMs to learn more effectively, so I end up needing it less and less.

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Generating huge consumer surpluses as a business strategy? Awesome if true.

Err, yes, until the surplus kills off all other competition and allows the supplier to jack prices up sky high, or otherwise bend consumers to their will. There's a reason most countries will stop foreign firms from doing this to them.

In this case, its not competition in the form of foreign company.

Its competition of engineers, scientists, and intellectual labor being atrophied due to overuse of LLM.

Pushing costs at 1/100 for 'thinking' gets intellectual labor people hooked and dependent. Then when costs go 300x, leaves people dumber and less capable of doing things on their own.

LLM companies, by not accurately charging for services, are directly dumping on world-level society and devaluing and addicting people to outsource thinking. Thats the problem.

In reality all subsidized and 'free' services do exactly this. LLM token vendors are making a play against human thought.

Except there's lots of competition for creating that surplus, including from open source locally-hosted LLMs, and while it's behind the frontier it's not that far behind the frontier.

The dumping -> non-competitive price increases playbook is historically very, very rare, and relies on a monopoly (or in a few cases oligopoly) with large externally-enforced barriers to entry. The oligopoly case is highly unstable and doesn't last, and besides we don't have notable barriers to entry; we have both market competitors and locally-hosted imperfect substitute goods.

There's essentially no reason to believe the dynamic you're predicting could succeed here, because we lack all the conditions that make it more likely to succeed, and it's very rare anyway.

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