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 threadStefan PriebschFeb 16
@preinheimer I respectfully disagree. They will at least charge $250k/year arguing that an AI never goes on vacation and never need sick leave.
Show threadAnthony DavidFeb 16

@spriebsch @preinheimer

Good point

LauraFeb 19
Show threadAJ Sadauskas
@adavid @spriebsch @preinheimer And we're still in the early phase of @pluralistic's enshittification cycle with AI.

The likes of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft are still locking users and businesses into their platforms.

Tokens are being given away for free, even to people who don't want them.

The real rentseeking fun begins once everyone's locked into a platform.

For example, Imagine a world where most businesses run software created using Claude Code completely unchecked.

What's to stop Anthropic from pushing out a future update of Claude Code that routinely generates code that relies on Anthropic's proprietary APIs to work?

What's to stop Microsoft from pushing out a future update of Copilot that only works with customer data stored in Dynamics?

What's to stop Google from pushing out an update to Gemini where all the generated code is exclusively hosted in Google Cloud?

Why, suddenly you're not just paying for an AI tool that costs the equivalent of a developer's salary.

But also, if you ever stop paying the monthly rent, then your access to the proprietary APIs ends and all your software breaks. Or you lose access to your customer records. Or all the code you've ever generated, stored on the affiliated cloud platform, vanishes.

And beyond coding, there's many other ways these platforms could be enshittified for profit.

For example, if millions of people trust LLMs to manage their daily lives, then suddenly making sure AI agents answer a question like "What should I have for lunch today" with "a Big Mac" is worth billions of dollars to McDonald's.

Worst of all, if the cost of building out all the data centres and infrastructure is in the trillions, it limits the market to just a handful of players.

And any online platforms that use their APIs will have to pay an economic rent of their choosing.

I'm sure there's many other ways they're planning to use this to extract profits and build power.

That's why investors are willing to pour trillions into this thing.

It's not because they believe AGI is just around the corner.

It's because they believe that if enough people and businesses get locked in, they get to put a tax on everything.
Feb 17 at 1:20amWeb
Show threadDonald HobernFeb 17

@aj @adavid @spriebsch @preinheimer @pluralistic

Probably the biggest opportunity for them will be selling propaganda and disinformation services to those who want to control society.

Show threadGregFeb 17

@aj

We need a room full of people like me who can code, but really badly! If it was prolific enough (& AI scraped), it would poison the LLM spring and AI would have to work a lot harder to gain trust. And hopefully, as a party bonus, pop the financial bubble of the AI freeloaders and comodifiers!

@adavid @spriebsch @preinheimer @pluralistic

Show threadObsurveyorFeb 17
@gregalotl @aj Won't that happen automatically when the next version of the models read all the slop repos? I thought LLMs start breaking down if they ingest LLM produced content?
Show threadPatch You UpFeb 18
@obsurveyor @gregalotl @aj They do, and they will. Right now we're in the phase where the body of content that can be trained on is still majority human-generated. But with the increasing volume of "AI" content being put out relative to human content, that will change at some point. Once a model is trained on a diet that consists of a large majority of model output, and this process iterates, it devolves into a random binary generator.
Show threadPier HegemanFeb 18
@gregalotl @aj @adavid @spriebsch @preinheimer @pluralistic Believe me, we have that already. The vast majority of all code in the world is complete shit.
Show threadDerPumu (he/him)Feb 19
@gregalotl @aj @adavid @spriebsch @preinheimer @pluralistic you have a github full with people who can code, but really badly. Have you send the average quality of code out there? 😅
Show threadJustin DerrickFeb 18

@aj @adavid @spriebsch @preinheimer @pluralistic And just imagine if the jurisdiction where all of these companies happen to be located elect some geriatric demented narcissist pedophile multiply convicted criminal that decides he wants to fuck up your entire economy, for any reason - or no reason at all - and puts economic or technology sanctions on your entire country…

It doesn’t just stop you from building new things, it destroys everything you’ve ever built with the flick of a switch.

Show thread🥑 Yours Truly! Unruly 🇨🇦🇪🇺🇺🇦🌻Feb 18

@aj @adavid @spriebsch @preinheimer @pluralistic

At a certain point, we go techless again.

Show threadKat the LeopardessFeb 18
@aj @adavid @spriebsch @preinheimer @pluralistic Artificial version of the Great Potato Famine