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Comment by mlsu | Hacker News Reader

Is this “swelling AI tax revenue” and “wealth redistribution” in the room with us right now?

I see wealth redistribution alright. Not in the direction you’re thinking!

Well at the moment AI hasn't made anyone any money. It's redistributed investors money (typically wealthy although some pension plans have been caught up too) to tradespeople, to Nvidia, SK Hynix, Micron and other specialised vendors with pricing power.

After that it's like... Who is making money? "we're doing 100x the things we're doing before" people can't really point to anything. Maybe it's in use everywhere all the time, and they've been pumping out twice the amount of features that no one uses or asked for as before, in which case this is classic value destruction

Yes, they're redistributing my 401k and a good portion of the entire economy into it, with the ostensible goal of automating my job and putting me permanently out of work.

Tails I win heads you lose!

we are seeing robust profits and growth in margins in the S&P even ex tech and some of this spillover from the hyperscaling but some may be due to productivity enhancement from AI.

We have a lot of competing frontier or near-frontier AI companies. So far a lot of the productivity improvements seem to be delivered as customer surplus.

Worker pessimism over technological unemployment risk is enough to explain profit growth via wage suppression with no need to invoke productivity gains, and AIUI these sorts of indicators have been leading on AI capabilities and adoption.

Well, M2 supply and enshittification aren't slowing down.

There is money to be made in AI, the loss we're seeing is because they're in a bubble of spending way too much on R&D and building datacenters. AI companies aren't losing money on individual queries.

I agree the projected revenue makes no sense, but if the bubble bursts, we'll still be left with a technology that (1) many people want to use (2) is lucrative to the providers.

Thanks for pointing this out, you've saved me from wasting my time on this article.

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