Paul ReinheimerFeb 16

If an "AI" company can sell you access to software that will replace a $250k/year software engineer. They're going to charge $249k/year for it.

That's how capitalism works.

Well, they're going to charge $20k/year at first, during the land rush phase. Wait for some competitors to die off. Keep it low a while longer to kill off the incumbents. Then it'll jump up a bunch, before finally being even more expensive than the original thing.

See also: Uber & AirBnB.

Show threadJeffrey P. Bigham 🔥🔥Feb 17
@preinheimer uber has been able to increase prices b/c they pretty much killed off everyone, thank goodness for lyft. it's less clear to me how this will develop in AI … Google seems capable of staying around for the long haul, and certainly people are betting big on Anthropic and OpenAI, will they specialize in some way to find a silo, or will competition lead to someone dominating?
Show threadTristan Colgate-McFarlane
@jbigham @preinheimer it's also interesting to ponder that while we may think Uber won because of the user experience, the apps could have happened (and did), without the switch in employment model.
Ultimately the millions in VC money went in to lower prices to kill the private hire industry. Not to create a nice app. Not because the Uber model was better, but to make the Uber model the only option.
VC money established a cartel monopoly. The "tech" element is entirely incidental.
Feb 18 at 11:40amWeb
Show threadPaul ReinheimerFeb 18
@tmcfarlane @jbigham I loved Hailo, which offered real taxis with the app experience. I think they had a hard time competing with companies paying below living wage if you calculated wear and tear on your car.
Show threadTristan Colgate-McFarlaneFeb 18
@preinheimer @jbigham there were a handful of taxi firms in london that seemed to use an app (I suspect white boxed from Hailo). Most of those now seem to have shifted to the "on-demand" marketplace model (no permanent crew, just putting jobs up on the app).
Taxis are completely awful now. If you book one 2 days in advance, they don't tender the job until 10 mins before your booked time, and more often than not, you don't get a driver on time.
Zero point in booking in advance.
Show threadJeffrey P. Bigham 🔥🔥Feb 18
@tmcfarlane @preinheimer interestingly, when you book a ride in advance on uber, they do find a driver beforehand, at least for less busy routes. you can actually get someone in fairly kind rural'ish parts of the U.S. doing this
Show threadJeffrey P. Bigham 🔥🔥Feb 18
@tmcfarlane @preinheimer i think there were vastly different experience with pre-uber car services. in pittsburgh, it was an incredible mess, a different nasty private equity firm had bought up the local places, made it both super expensive and super unreliable to get a taxi, so nobody misses them here. but, sad for places that had a working model before