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Comment by borzi | Hacker News Reader

The reason uber didn't loose that much business is because it replaced the established businesses and left most consumers with little alternative.

That's not the case with AI - unless the frontier labs achieve AGI or some sort of super intelligence that lets them create infinite economic value (at which point, any further discussion is pointless for obvious reasons), the average worker can do most of their tasks with 5% of the api costs using an open source model from China and achieve the same results.

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> The reason uber didn't loose that much business is because it replaced the established businesses and left most consumers with little alternative.

The established businesses were awful. There was not a thriving and beloved taxi service in every city pre-Uber. Taxis were bad and very expensive.

Also did you forget that Lyft exists and normal taxis are still available? Taxi services had to improve their business when the ride sharing companies entered the market because they previously relied on their own grip on on-demand transportation to keep prices high and service poor.

Imagine suddenly a new taxi business was able to come into your city and provided taxi rides for 5 cents on the dollar. What would happen?

Edit: now add on top of that that even if uber tried to undercut them again by running losses as they did in the past, that new taxi business would not loose any money if the number of their rides went down because their operating costs simply scale with the number of rides - while uber was loosing money on every ride.

> Imagine suddenly a new taxi business was able to come into your city and provided taxi rides for 5 cents on the dollar. What would happen?

I literally lived through this situation. It was not 5 cents on the dollar. The taxis continued to exist then and continue to exist now.

> the average worker can do most of their tasks with 5% of the api costs using an open source model from China and achieve the same results.

Are you also going to tell me that everyone will be switching to their favorite Linux desktop distribution over Mac & Win because it's "free"?

We're talking about corporations here. Of course they use Linux, and of course they'll provide their employees access to the LLMs that cost half the price and are 90% as good.

I can't tell if you're being serious or sarcastic.

In case it's the former, nobody in the corporate world is using Linux desktops.

And let me know when your parents start using the Chinese LLMs on their own.

> nobody in the corporate world is using Linux desktops

This is the wrong comparison. An LLM provider isn't like a desktop OS; it's like a server OS. And everybody is using Linux for their servers.

> And let me know when your parents start using the Chinese LLMs on their own.

That already happened. To be fair, they're Chinese.

How is the effort switching from an operating system containing all your data and apps, which might not be compatible with the new one, comparable to just switching an api key?

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