So where’s the return? Outside of annualized numbers I haven’t even heard people pretend that OAI or Anthropic are profitable. If this is all about ROI there’s sure been a lot of I for as yet unrealized R.
Workers lose their ability to earn a living, but OpenAI and Anthropic become the gatekeepers to effectively all productivity.
I know I sound tinfoil hat here but I don't see how else the numbers work. The only thing full-priced, profit-earning AI can possibly be cheaper than is, in my mind: as much of the workforce's salaries and cost of benefits as it can manage to offset, put together.
It's a great plan if you're a CEO who can't see beyond the next quarter's earnings call. Less so if you want things like, just pulling from a hat here, a functioning economy, a stable society, the ability for humans at large to live. But it's not like the owning class hasn't been undermining all of that for the better part of 50 years anyway.
I genuinely don't get what the endgame here is, just AI's talking to AI's everywhere and somehow they think everything just keeps on making money I guess? But then again our current crop of oligarchs are pretty mediocre all around, so calling any of this a "plan" at all feels a stretch. Just cut costs every quarter, make the products worse, fire everyone who knows anything and sail off into the sunset making more money than any human being can actually spend in the process.
We can't discuss the finance of private companies so we have to wait for their IPO, acquisition by some public company, or bankruptcy to find out more.
The story written in the public numbers, from corporations or government statistics, is one of rise in factor productivity, rise in capital returns, and decline in wage participation in overall income.
I'm merely observing that it seems to be the latest chapter in the development of the capitalistic corporation.