Hacker News Reader

Comment by pastel8739 | Hacker News Reader

People use AI because it is cheaper than paying humans to think. Soon you won’t really be able to find human thinkers.

Some humans will need to interpret the thinking and apply it somewhere and take some responsibility for those decisions. If you think AI can do all that end to end it’s a different question but we’re nowhere near that right now.

Definitely, I’m not saying that AI can entirely replace humans. But AI is definitely replacing parts of many jobs. If AI companies raise their rates to be profitable, and it turns out that paying for profitable AI is not worth it vs paying for humans, that might be a sticky situation.

There will always be a competitor that can undercut the inference market. There is no "moat" given that you can self host decently capable LLM agents like Qwen3.6 on not super expensive hardware, like an AMD R9700, and still get competitive speeds to most cloud interfaces.

If you can self host it that easily, any Joe can scale it out much like shared web hosting, and shared web hosting or even dedicated rented boxes has always been cheaper than the big cloud providers.

I don't think OpenAI or Anthropic can reasonable compete in the long term if they can't achieve "AGI", and they won't, no matter what shareholders desire.

Actually the point is total cost wise outside of subsidy it is not cheaper than humans. the bigger problem is as the parent said open AI created a market. It is selling a commodity service with investor funds. There is no moat. your second sentence soon you won't be able to find human thinkers is on its face absurd, assuming the human race continues. Thinking is the human ecological niche.

Thinking doesn’t disappear because of OpenAI’s shitty LLM’s.

It certainly disappear for their customers however.

The hot-take that humans are going to stop thinking because of AI is the only convincing evidence of the idea i’ve come across so far.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com