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Their goal is to monopolize labor for anything that has to do with i/o on a computer, which is way more than SWE. Its simple, this technology literally cannot c

by dakolli 8mo ago

Their goal is to monopolize labor for anything that has to do with i/o on a computer, which is way more than SWE. Its simple, this technology literally cannot create new jobs it simply can cause one engineer (or any worker whos job has to do with computer i/o) to do the work of 3, therefore allowing you to replace workers (and overwork the ones you keep). Companies don't need "more work" half the "features"/"products" that companies produce is already just extra. They can get rid of 1/3-2/3s of their labor and make the same amount of money, why wouldn't they. ZeroHedge on twitter said the following: "According to the market, AI will disrupt everything... except labor, which magically will be just fine after millions are laid off." Its also worth noting that if you can create a business with an LLM, so can everyone else. And sadly everyone has the same ideas, everyone ends up working on the same things causing competition to push margins to nothing. There's nothing special about building with LLMs as anyone can just copy you that has access to the same models and basic thought processes. This is basic economics. If everyone had an oil well on their property that was affordable to operate the price of oil would be more akin to the price of water. EDIT: Since people are focusing on my water analogy I mean: If everyone has easy access to the same powerful LLMs that would just drive down the value you can contribute to the economy to next to nothing. For this reason I don't even think powerful and efficient open source models, which is usually the next counter argument people make, are necessarily a good thing. It strips people of the opportunity for social mobility through meritocratic systems. Just like how your water well isn't going to make your rich or allow you to climb a social ladder, because everyone already has water.

jasondigitized 8mo ago
So like....every business having electricity? I am not a economist so would love someone smarter than me explain how this is any different than the advent of electricity and how that affected labor.
- shimman 8mo ago
  The difference is that electricity wasn't being controlled by oligarchs that want to shape society so they become more rich while pillaging the planet and hurting/killing real human beings. I'd be more trusting of LLM companies if they were all workplace democracies, not really a big fan of the centrally planned monarchies that seem to be most US corporations.
  - vel0city 8mo ago
    I mean your description sounds a lot like the early history of large industrialization of electricity. Lots of questionable safety and labor practices, proprietary systems, misinformation, doing absolutely terrible things to the environment to fuel this demand, massive monopolies, etc.
  - wedog6 8mo ago
    Heard of Carnegie? He controlled coal when it was the main fuel used for heating and electricity.
    - shimman 8mo ago
      Did Carnegie try to overthrow a democracy and believe in monarchism?
    - HalfCrimp 8mo ago
      A reference to one of the hall of fame Robber Barons does seem pretty apt right now..
      - genghisjahn 8mo ago
        At least they built libraries, cultural centers and the occasional university.
        toyg 8mo ago
        Nowadays they just try to put more whiteys on the moon, or sabotage liberal democracy.
        codebje 8mo ago
        Give the current crop a chance to realise their mortality and want to secure a better legacy than 'took all the money'.
        andyferris 8mo ago
- trollbridge 8mo ago
  An obvious argument to this is that electricity is becoming a lot more expensive (because of LLMs), so how is that going to affect labour?
noshitsherlock 8mo ago
Yeah, but a Stratocaster guitar is available to everybody too, but not everybody’s an Eric Clapton
- noshitsherlock 8mo ago
  I can buy the CD From the Cradle for pennies, but it would cost me hundreds of dollars to see Eric Clapton live
- user3939382 8mo ago
  This is correct. An LLM is a tool. Having a better guitar doesn’t make you sound good if you don’t know how to play. If you were a low skill software systems etc arch before LLM you’re gonna be a bad one after as well. Someone at some point is deciding what the agent should be doing. LLMs compete more with entry level / juniors.
RobertoG 8mo ago
The price of oil at the price of water (ecology apart) should be a good thing. Automation should be, obviously, a good thing, because more is produced with less labor. What it says of ourselves and our politics that so many people (me included) are afraid of it? In a sane world, we would realize that, in a post-work world, the owner of the robots have all the power, so the robots should be owned in common. The solution is political.
- dakolli 8mo ago
  Throughout history Empires have bet their entire futures on the predictions of seers, magicians and done so with enthusiasm. When political leaders think their court magicians can give them an edge, they'll throw the baby out with the bathwater to take advantage of it. It seems to me that the Machine Learning engineers and AI companies are the court magicians of our time. I certainly don't have much faith in the current political structures, they're uneducated on most subjects they're in charge of and taking the magicians at their word, the magicians have just gotten smarter and don't call it magic anymore. I would actually call it magic though, just actually real. Imagine explaining to political strategists from 100 years ago, the ability to influence politicians remotely, while they sit in a room by themselves a la dictating what target politicians see on their phones and feed them content to steer them in a certain directions.. Its almost like a synthetic remote viewing.. And if that doesn't work, you also have buckets of cash :|
- K0balt 8mo ago
  While I agree, I am not hopeful. The incentive alignment has us careening towards Elysium rather than Star Trek.
- yoz-y 8mo ago
  What do we “need” more of? Here in France we need more doctors, more nurseries, more teachers… I don’t see AI helping much there in short to middle term (with teachers all research points to AI making it massively worse even) Globally I think we need better access to quality nutrition and more affordable medicine. Generally cheaper energy.
  - 8mo ago
conception 8mo ago
I have never been in an organization where everyone was sitting around, wondering what to do next. If the economy was actually as good as certain government officials claimed to be, we would be hiring people left and right to be able to do three times as much work, not firing.
- dakolli 8mo ago
  That's the thing, profits and equities are at all time highs, but these companies have laid off 400k SWEs in the last 16 months in the US, which should tell you what their plans are for this technology and augmenting their businesses.
  - falkensmaize 8mo ago
    The last 16 months of layoffs are almost certainly not because of LLMs. All the cheap money went away, and suddenly tech companies have to be profitable. That means a lot of them are shedding anything not nailed down to make their quarter look better.
    - DrewADesign 8mo ago
      The point is there’s no close positive correlation at that scale between labor and profits — hence the layoffs while these companies are doing better than ever. There’s zero reason to think increased productivity would lead to vastly more output from the company with the same amount of workers rather than far fewer workers and about the same amount of output, which is probably driven more by the market than a supply bottleneck.
hughw 8mo ago
Retail water[1] costs $881/bbl which is 13x the price of Brent crude. [1] https://www.walmart.com/ip/Aquafina-Purified-Drinking-Water-12-oz-Bottles-8-pk/8639571244?classType=REGULAR https://www.walmart.com/ip/Aquafina-Purified-Drinking-Water-...
- dakolli 8mo ago
  What a good faith reply. If you sincerely believe this, that's a good insight into how dumb the masses are. Although I would expect a higher quality of reply on HN. You found the most expensive 8pck of water on Walmart. Anyone can put a listing on Walmart, its the same model as Amazon. There's also a listing right below for bottles twice the size, and a 32 pack for a dollar less. It cost $0.001 per gallon out of your tap, and you know this..
  - oliyoung 8mo ago
    I'm in South Australia, the driest state on the driest continent, we have a backup desalination plant and water security is common on the political agenda - water is probably as expensive here than most places in the world "The 2025-26 water use price for commercial customers is now $3.365/kL (or $0.003365 per litre)" https://www.sawater.com.au/my-account/water-and-sewerage-prices/water-prices/commercial-water-prices https://www.sawater.com.au/my-account/water-and-sewerage-pri...
  - hughw 8mo ago
    Water just comes out of a tap? My household water comes from a 500 ft well on my property requiring a submersible pump costing $5000 that gets replaced ever 10-15 years or so with a rig and service that cost another 10k. Call it $1000/year... but it also requires a giant water softener, in my case a commercial one that amortizes out to $1000/year, and monthly expenditure of $70 for salt (admittedly I have exceptionally hard water). And of course, I, and your municipality too, don't (usually) pay any royalties to "owners" of water that we extract. Water is, rightly, expensive, and not even expensive enough.
    - not_kurt_godel 8mo ago
wiredpancake 8mo ago
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guyomes 8mo ago
> They can get rid of 1/3-2/3s of their labor and make the same amount of money, why wouldn't they. Competition may encourage companies to keep their labor. For example, in the video game industry, if the competitors of a company start shipping their games to all consoles at once, the company might want to do the same. Or if independent studios start shipping triple A games, a big studio may want to keep their labor to create quintuple A games. On the other hand, even in an optimistic scenario where labor is still required, the skills required for the jobs might change. And since the AI tools are not mature yet, it is difficult to know which new skills will be useful in ten years from now, and it is even more difficult to start training for those new skills now. With the help of AI tools, what would a quintuple A game look like? Maybe once we see some companies shipping quintuple A games that have commercial success, we might have some ideas on what new skills could be useful in the video game industry for example.
- DrewADesign 8mo ago
  Yeah but there’s no reason to assume this is even a possibility. SW Companies that are making more money than ever are slashing their workforces. Those garbage Coke and McDonald’s commercials clearly show big industry is trying to normalize bad quality rather than elevate their output. In theory, cheap overseas tweening shops should have allowed the midcentury American cartoon industry to make incredible quality at the same price, but instead, there was a race straight to the bottom. I’d love to have even a shred of hope that the future you describe is possible but I see zero empirical evidence that anyone is even considering it.
mbrumlow 8mo ago
> They can get rid of 1/3-2/3s of their labor and make the same amount of money, why wouldn't they. Because companies want to make MORE money. Your hypothetical company is now competing with another company who didn’t opposite, and now they get to market faster, fix bugs faster, add feature faster, and responding to changes in the industry faster. Which results in them making more, while your employ less company is just status quo. Also. With regards to oil, the consumption of oil increases as it became cheaper. With AI we now have a chance to do projects that simply would have cost way too much to do 10 years ago.
- rglullis 8mo ago
  > Which results in them making more Not necessarily. You are assuming that the people can consume whatever is put in front of them. Markets get saturated fast. The "changes in the industry" mean nothing.
  - DrewADesign 8mo ago
    A) People are so used to infinite growth that it’s hard to imagine a market where that doesn’t exist. The industry can have enough developers and there’s a good chance we’re going to crash right the fuck into that pretty quickly. America’s industrial labor pool seemed like it provided an ever-expanding supply of jobs right up until it didn’t. Then, in the 80s, it started going backwards preeeetttty dramatically. B) No amount of money will make people buy something that doesn’t add value to or enrich their lives. You still need ideas, for things in markets that have room for those ideas. This is where product design comes in. Despite what many developers think, there are many kinds of designers in this industry and most of them are not the software equivalent of interior decorators. Designing good products is hard, and image generators don’t make that easier.
    - dakolli 8mo ago
      Its really wild how much good UI stands out to me now that the internet is been flooded with generically produced slop. I created a bookmarks folder for beautiful sites that clearly weren't created by LLMs and required a ton of sweat to design the UI/UX. I think we will transition to a world where handmade software/design will come at a huge premium (especially as the average person gets more distanced from the actual work required to do so, and the skills become rarer). Just like the wealthy pay for handmade shoes, as opposed to something off the shelf from footlocker, I think companies will revert back to hand crafted UX. These identical center column layout's with a 3x3 feature card grid at the bottom of your landing page are going to get really old fast in a sea of identical design patterns. To be fair component libraries were already contributing to this degradation in design quality, but LLM s are making it much worse.
josephg 8mo ago
> Its also worth noting that if you can create a business with an LLM, so can everyone else. And sadly everyone has the same ideas Yeah, this is quite thought provoking. If computer code written by LLMs is a commodity, what new businesses does that enable? What can we do cheaply we couldn't do before? One obvious answer is we can make a lot more custom stuff. Like, why buy Windows and Office when I can just ask claude to write me my own versions instead? Why run a commodity operating system on kiosks? We can make so many more one-off pieces of software. The fact software has been so expensive to write over the last few decades has forced software developers to think a lot about how to collaborate. We reuse code as much as we can - in shared libraries, common operating systems & APIs, cloud services (eg AWS) and so on. And these solutions all come with downsides - like supply chain attacks, subscription fees and service outages. LLMs can let every project invent its own tree of dependencies. Which is equal parts great and terrifying. There's that old line that businesses should "commoditise their compliment". If you're amazon, you want package delivery services to be cheap and competitive. If software is the commodity, what is the bespoke value-added service that can sit on top of all that?
- pixelatedindex 8mo ago
  > If software is the commodity, what is the bespoke value-added service that can sit on top of all that? It would be cool if I can brew hardware at home by getting AI to design and 3D print circuit boards with bespoke software. Alas, we are constrained by physics. At the moment.
- echelon 8mo ago
  > Yeah, this is quite thought provoking. If computer code written by LLMs is a commodity, what new businesses does that enable? What can we do cheaply we couldn't do before? The model owner can just withhold access and build all the businesses themselves. Financial capital used to need labor capital. It doesn't anymore. We're entering into scary territory. I would feel much better if this were all open source, but of course it isn't.
  - cardine 8mo ago
    I think this risk is much lower in a world where there are lots of different model owners competing with each other, which is how it appears to be playing out.
leonflexo 8mo ago
> Its also worth noting that if you can create a business with an LLM, so can everyone else. And sadly everyone has the same ideas Yeah, people are going to have to come to terms with the "idea" equivalent of "there are no unique experiences". We're already seeing the bulk move toward the meta SaaS (Shovels as a Service).
deleted 8mo ago
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tjr 8mo ago
Its also worth noting that if you can create a business with an LLM, so can everyone else. One possibility may be that we normalize making bigger, more complex things. In pre-LLM days, if I whipped up an application in something like 8 hours, it would be a pretty safe assumption that someone else could easily copy it. If it took me more like 40 hours, I still have no serious moat, but fewer people would bother spending 40 hours to copy an existing application. If it took me 100 hours, or 200 hours, fewer and fewer people would bother trying to copy it. Now, with LLMs... what still takes 40+ hours to build?
- FuckButtons 8mo ago
  The arrow of time leads towards complexity. There is no reason to assume anything otherwise.
onlyrealcuzzo 8mo ago
Last I checked, the tractor and plow are doing a lot more work than 3 farmers, yet we've got more jobs and grow more food. People will find work to do, whether that means there's tens of thousands of independent contractors, whether that means people migrate into new fields, or whether that means there's tens of multi-trillion dollar companies that would've had 200k engineers each that now only have 50k each and it's basically a net nothing. People will be fine. There might be big bumps in the road. Doom is definitely not certain.
- theappsecguy 8mo ago
  More jobs where? In farming? Is that why farming in the US is dying, being destroyed by corporations and farmers are now prisoners to John Deer? It’s hilarious that you chose possibly the worst counter example here…
  - satvikpendem 8mo ago
    More output, not more farmers. The stratification of labor in civilization is built on this concept, because if not for more food, we'd have more "farmer jobs" of course, because everyone would be subsistence farming...
    - intended 8mo ago
      That’s not the statement made by the grand parent comment tho. That comment reads as stating an increase in farming jobs.
- zaphirplane 8mo ago
  Wow you are making a point of everything will be ok using farming ! Farming is struggling consolidated to big big players and subsidies keep it going You get layed off and spend 2-3 years migrating to another job type what do you think g that will do to your life or family. Those starting will have a paused life those 10 fro retirement are stuffed.
- nl 8mo ago
benlivengood 8mo ago
decreasing COGS creates wealth and consumer surplus, though. If we can flatten the social hierarchy to reduce the need for social mobility then that kills two birds with one stone.
- dakolli 8mo ago
  Do you really think the ruling class has any plans to allow that to happen... There's a reason so much surveillance tech is being rolled out across the world. If the world needs 1/3 of the labor to sustain the ruling class's desires, they will try to reduce the amount of extra humans. I'm certain of this. My guess is during this "2nd industrial revolution" they will make young men so poor through the alienation of their labor that they beg to fight in a war. In that process they will get young men (and women) to secure resources for the ruling class and purge themselves in the process.
- intended 8mo ago
  In a simplified economic model though.
a_tartaruga 8mo ago
I don't disagree with everything you are saying. But you seem to be assuming that contributing to technology is a zero sum game when it concretely grows the wealth of the world. > If everyone had an oil well on their property that was affordable to operate the price of oil would be more akin to the price of water. This is not necessarily even true https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
- pvab3 8mo ago
  Jevon's Paradox is know as a paradox for a reason. It's not "Jevon's Law that totally makes sense and always happens".
ctoth 8mo ago
> And sadly everyone has the same ideas, everyone ends up working on the same things This is someone telling you they have never had an idea that surprised them. Or more charitably, they've never been around people whose ideas surprised them. Their entire model of "what gets built" is "the obvious thing that anyone would build given the tools." No concept of taste, aesthetic judgment, problem selection, weird domain collisions, or the simple fact that most genuinely valuable things were built by people whose friends said "why would you do that?"
- dakolli 8mo ago
  I'm speaking about the vast majority of people, who yes, build the same things. Look at any HN post over the last 6 months and you'll see everyone sharing clones of the same product. Yes some ideas or novel, I would argue that LLMs destroy or atrophy the creative muscle in people, much like how GPS powered apps destroyed people's mental navigation "muscles". I would also argue that very few unique valuable "things" built by people ever had people saying "Why would you build that". Unless we're talking about paradigm shifting products that are hard for people to imagine, like a vacuum cleaner in the 1800s. But guess what, llms aren't going to help you build those things.. They can create shitty images, clones of SaaS products that have been built 50x over, and all around encourage people to be mediocre and destroy their creativity as their brains atrophy from their use.
alexpotato 8mo ago
> Its also worth noting that if you can create a business with an LLM, so can everyone else. And sadly everyone has the same ideas, everyone ends up working on the same things causing competition to push margins to nothing. This was true before LLMs. For example, anyone can open a restaurant (or a food truck). That doesn't mean that all restaurants are good or consistent or match what people want. Heck, you could do all of those things but if your prices are too low then you go out of business. A more specific example with regards to coding: We had books, courses, YouTube videos, coding boot camps etc but it's estimated that even at the PEAK of developer pay less than 5% of the US adult working population could write even a basic "Hello World" program in any language. In other words, I'm skeptical of "everyone will be making the same thing" (emphasis on the "everyone").
root_axis 8mo ago
> Its also worth noting that if you can create a business with an LLM If that were true, LLM companies would just use it themselves to make money rather than sell and give away access to the models at a loss.
bandrami 8mo ago
Which leads to the uncomfortable but difficult to avoid conclusion that having some friction in the production of code was actually helping because it was keeping people from implementing bad ideas.
xhrpost 8mo ago
There's an older article that gets reposted to HN occasionally, titled something like "I hate almost all software". I'm probably more cynical than the average tech user and I relate strongly to the sentiment. So so much software is inexcusably bad from a UX perspective. So I have to ask, if code will really become this dirt cheap unlimited commodity, will we actually have good software?
- ethbr1 8mo ago
  Depends on whether you think good software comes from good initial design (then yes, via the monkeys with typewriters path) or intentional feature evolution (then no, because that's a more artistic, skilled endeavor). Anyone who lived through 90s OSS UX and MySpace would likely agree that design taste is unevenly distributed throughout the population.
sp1nningaway 8mo ago
Here is a very real example of how an LLM can at least save, if not create jobs, and also not take a programmers job: I work for a cash-strapped nonprofit. We have a business idea that can scale up a service we already offer. The new product is going to need coding, possibly a full-scale app. We don't have any capacity to do it in-house and don't have an easy way to find or afford vendor that can work on this somewhat niche product. I don't have the time to help develop this product but I'm VERY confident an LLM will be able to deliver what we need faster and at a lower cost than a contractor. This will save money we couldn't afford to gamble on an untested product AND potentially create several positions that don't currently exist in our org to support the new product.
- spankalee 8mo ago
  Do you have someone who can babysit and review what the LLM does? Otherwise, I'm not sure we're at the point where you can just tell an agent to go off and build something and it does it _correctly_. IME, you'll just get demoware if you don't have the time and attention to detail to really manage the process.
- lyu07282 8mo ago
  But if you could afford to hire a worker for this job, that an LLM would be able to do for a fraction of the cost (by your estimation), then why on earth would you ever waste money on a worker? By extension if you pay a worker and an AI or robot comes along that can do the work for cheaper, then why would you not fire the worker and replace them with the cheaper alternative? Its kind of funny to see capitalists brains all over this thread desperately try to make it make sense. It's almost like the system is broken, but that can't possibly be right everybody believes in capitalism, everybody can't be wrong. Wake the fuck up.
  - sp1nningaway 8mo ago
    New people hired for this project would not be coders. They would be an expert in the service we offer, and would be doing work an LLM is not capable of. I don't know if LLMs would be capable of also doing that job in the future, but my org (a mission-driven non profit) can get very real value from LLMs right now, and it's not a zero-sum value that takes someone's job away.
majormajor 8mo ago
> Their goal is to monopolize labor for anything that has to do with i/o on a computer, which is way more than SWE. Its simple, this technology literally cannot create new jobs it simply can cause one engineer (or any worker whos job has to do with computer i/o) to do the work of 3, therefore allowing you to replace workers (and overwork the ones you keep). Companies don't need "more work" half the "features"/"products" that companies produce is already just extra. They can get rid of 1/3-2/3s of their labor and make the same amount of money, why wouldn't they. Most companies have "want to do" lists much longer than what actually gets done. I think the question for many will be is it actually useful to do that. For instance, there's only so much feature-rollout/user-interface churn that users will tolerate for software products. Or, for a non-software company that has had a backlog full of things like "investigate and find a new ERP system", how long will that backlog be able to keep being populated.
eru 8mo ago
> Their goal is to monopolize labor for anything that has to do with i/o on a computer, which is way more than SWE. Its simple, this technology literally cannot create new jobs it simply can cause one engineer (or any worker whos job has to do with computer i/o) to do the work of 3, therefore allowing you to replace workers (and overwork the ones you keep). Companies don't need "more work" half the "features"/"products" that companies produce is already just extra. They can get rid of 1/3-2/3s of their labor and make the same amount of money, why wouldn't they. Yes, that's how technology works in general. It's good and intended. You can't have baristas (for all but the extremely rich), when 90%+ of people are farmers. > ZeroHedge on twitter said the following: Oh, ZeroHedge. I guess we can stop any discussion now..
- deleted 8mo ago
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- danelski 8mo ago
  The baristas example can only make me think that with the growing wealth disparity and no obvious exit path for white collars we might see a big return of servant-like jobs for below 1%. Who wouldn't want to wake up and daily assist life of some remaining upper-middle class Anthropic's employee?
  - eru 8mo ago
    What growing wealth disparity? Btw, globally equality hasn't looked better in probably more than a century by now. Especially in terms of real consumption.
    - danelski 8mo ago
      Sorry, I don't see your point. While lifting up the masses out of extreme poverty globally is obviously good, it doesn't transfer to your situation unless you happen to live in one of these upstart countries. The society you live in is not global, even if we share more of popculture and technology now.
vintermann 8mo ago
Reply to your edit: what if we wanted to do with the water was simply to drink it? "Meritocratic climbing on the social ladder", I'm sorry but what are you on about?? As if that was the meaning in life? As if that was even a goal in itself? If it's one thing we need to learn in the age of AI, it's not to confuse the means to an end and the end itself!
whiplash451 8mo ago
> And sadly everyone has the same ideas I'm not sure that's true. If LLMs can help researchers implement (not find) new ideas faster, they effectively accelerate the progress of research. Like many other technologies, LLMs will fail in areas and succeed in others. I agree with your take regarding business ideas, but the story could be different for scientific discovery.
- dakolli 8mo ago
  One thing that's clear, LLMs cannot come up with novel ideas.
dr_dshiv 8mo ago
I don’t think we are running out of work to do… there seems to be an endless amount of work to be done. And most of it comes from human needs and desires.
rhubarbtree 8mo ago
If one person can do the job of three, then you can keep output the same and reduce headcount, or maintain headcount and improve output etc. Anecdotally it seems demand for software >> supply of software. So in engineering, I think we’ll see way more software. That’s what happened in the Industrial Revolution. Far more products, multiple orders of magnitude more, were produced. The Industrial Revolution was deeply disruptive to labour, even whilst creating huge wealth and jobs. Retraining is the real problem. That’s what we will see in software. If you can’t architect and think well, you’ll struggle. Being able to write boiler plate and repetitive low level code is a thing of the past. But there are jobs - you’re going to have to work hard to land them. Now, if AGI or superintelligence somehow renders all humans obsolete, that is a very different problem but that is also the end of capitalism so will be down to governments to address.
torginus 8mo ago
This is just a theory of mine, but the fact that people don't see LLMs as something that will grow the pie and increase their output leading to prosperity for all just means that real economic growth has stagnated. From all my interactions with C-level people as an engineer, what I learned from their mindset is their primary focus is growing their business - market entry, bringing out new products, new revenue streams. As an engineer I really love optimizing out current infra, bringing out tools and improved workflows, which many of my colleagues have considered a godsend, but it seems from a C-level perspective, it's just a minor nice-to-have. While I don't necessarily agree with their world-view, some part of it is undeniable - you can easily build an IT company with very high margins - say 3x revenue/expense ratio, in this case growing the profit is a much more lucrative way of growing the company.
vaeyshl 8mo ago
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arthurcolle 8mo ago
> Its also worth noting that if you can create a business with an LLM, so can everyone else. False. Anyone can learn about index ETFs and still yolo into 3DTE options and promptly get variation margined out of existence. Discipline and contextual reasoning in humans is not dependent on the tools they are using, and I think the take is completely and definitively wrong.
- dakolli 8mo ago
  *Checks Bio* Owns AI company and.... the whole family tree's portfolio :eyes:
sithamet 8mo ago
> everyone has access to the same models and basic thought processes Why haven't Warners acquired Netflix then, but the other way around? Even though they had access to the same labor market, a human LLM replacement? I think real economics is a little more complex than the "basic economics" referenced in your reply. This does not negate the possibility that enterprises will double down on replacing everyone with AI, though. But it does negate the reasoning behind the claim and the predictions made.
pickleRick243 8mo ago
I always find these "anti-AI" AI believer takes fascinating. If true AGI (which you are describing) comes to pass, there will certainly be massive societal consequences, and I'm not saying there won't be any dangers. But the economics in the resulting post-scarcity regime will be so far removed from our current world that I doubt any of this economic analysis will be even close to the mark. I think the disconnect is that you are imagining a world where somehow LLMs are able to one-shot web businesses, but robotics and real-world tech is left untouched. Once LLMs can publish in top math/physics journals with little human assistance, it's a small step to dominating NeurIPS and getting us out of our mini-winter in robotics/RL. We're going to have Skynet or Star Trek, not the current weird situation where poor people can't afford healthy food, but can afford a smartphone.
- rkomorn 8mo ago
  > We're going to have Skynet or Star Trek Star Trek only got a good society after an awful war, so neither of these options are good.
  - ramraj07 8mo ago
    Star Trek only got a good society after discovering FTL and existence of all manner of alien societies. And even after that Star Treks story motivations on why we turned good sound quite implausible given what we know about human nature and history. No effing way it will ever happen even if we discover aliens. Its just a wishful fever dream.
    - rkomorn 8mo ago
      I'm definitely not a Star Trek connoisseur but I thought a big part of the lore is the "never again"-ish response to the wars through WW3? But anyway, I share your lack of optimism.
      - dakolli 8mo ago
        Well they didn't necessarily stop waging war in Star Trek either.. They also spent most of their time trying to not get defeated by parasitic artificial intelligence.
gymbeaux 8mo ago
I have a few app ideas that I've been sitting on for years and they would all be things that would help me, things that I would actually use.. But they're also things that I think others would find useful. I had Claude Code create two of them so far, and yeah the code isn't what I would write, but the apps generally work and are useful to me. The idea of trying to monetize these apps that I didn't even write is strange to me, especially considering anyone else can just tell their Claude Code to "create an app that's a clone of appwebsite.com" and within an hour they will probably have a virtually identical clone of my app that I'm trying to charge money for. In this way, AI coding is a bummer. I also sincerely miss writing code. Merely reading it (or being a QA and telling Claude about bugs I find) is a shell of what software engineering used to be. I know with apps especially, all that really matters is how large your user base is, but to spend all that time and money getting the user base, only for them to jump ship next month for an even better vibe-coded solution... eh. I don't have any answers, I just agree that everyone has the same ideas and it's just going to be another form of enshittification. "My AI slop is better than your AI slop".
slashdev 8mo ago
It's not as easy to build a business as just copying someone (otherwise we'd have all been doing that long before LLMs). I expect the software market will change from lots of big kitchen sink included systems and services to many smaller more specialized solutions with small agile teams behind them. Some engineers that lose their jobs are going to create new businesses and new jobs. The question in my mind: is there enough feature and software demand out there to keep all of the engineers employed at 3x the productivity? Maybe. Software has been limited on the supply side by how expensive it was to produce. Now it may bump into limits on the demand side instead. Meanwhile LLMs are better than junior devs, so nobody wants to hire a junior dev. No idea how we get senior devs then. How many people will be scared away from entering this career path? The job has changed. How many software engineers will leave the career now that the job is more of a technically minded product person and code reviewer? I can't predict how it all plays out, but I'm along for the ride. Grieving the loss of programming and trying to get used to this new world.
kiriakosv 8mo ago
This worldview has, IMO, one omission. It implicitly assumes that everything will stay the same except for LLMs getting better and better, but in reality there are many interconnected factors in play. Will it fundamentally change or eliminate some jobs? I think yes. But at the same time, no one knows how this will play out in the long run. We certainly shouldn't extrapolate what will happen in the job market or society by treating AI performance as an independent variable.
motbus3 8mo ago
Edit: This ended up being such a big text. Sorry. I guess I agree but I want to add to your point is that, this tech is inexpensive. And unfortunately, not in the sense where it is related to the real value of a product or need for it, but as a market condition. But, to me, it seems that it will be more expensive anyway. I see these possibilities: 1. Few companies own all the technology. They cut the men in the middle and they have all kinds of super apps and will try to force into that ecosystem 2. Or, they succeeded in the substitution, they keep the man in the middle but they control whom will have access and how much it is going to be charged. The goal in this case will be to be more expensive to kickstart an engineering team than using the product and ofc, their goal will be to reach that threshold. 3. They completely fail, these businesses plateau'ed and they can't make it a better condition to subvert the current balance and take the market. This could happen if a big financial risk materialize or if they get stuck without big advancements for a long time and investors starts to demand their money back. I think we are going this 3rd route. We are seeing early signals of nonsense marketing strategy selling things that are not there yet. We see all of them silencing ethics and transparency teams. The truth is that they started to stack models together and sell as one thing which is much different from what they sold just a year and a half ago. I am not saying this couldn't be because this is really the best model, but because they couldn't scale it up even more now, even 18 months after the previous gen of giant model releases. The truth is that they probably need to start capitalising now because the crisis they are causing themselves might hurt them bad. We saw this decline or every bubble popping. They need to sell it too much so they can shift the risk from being on top of their money to be on top of someone else's money, and this potential is resold multiple times as investors realise the improvements are not coming. Until there is only the speculators dealing with this sorta of business, which will ultimately make those companies to take unpopular stupid decisions like it happened with bitcoin, super hero movies, NFT and maybe much more if I could think about it.
astrange 8mo ago
> Its simple, this technology literally cannot create new jobs it simply can cause one engineer (or any worker whos job has to do with computer i/o) to do the work of 3 That is a productivity improvement, which tends to increase employment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
runeks 8mo ago
> Companies don't need "more work" half the "features"/"products" that companies produce is already just extra. At my company we have a huge backlog where only the top of that iceberg is pulled every iteration to keep customers happy. If they fired 90% of the engineers assuming a 10x increase in productivity, they might be able to offer their product at half the price. But if they keep all their engineers they'd get 10x the features and could probably charge twice as much for it.
lumost 8mo ago
This really points to a world where all services are too cheap to meter. The compute side of AI is a commodity, the usage of AI is a commodity, the model development of AI is a commodity. So far there is no evidence that a provider with heavy usage has any long-term advantage over a vendor with no usage. New top tier models come out every week from relative unknowns. Other than a vast consolidation of what parts of the economy are "digital", what is going to have margin other than orphaned capital and "creative" efforts within 10 years? EDIT: the top ranked model on openrouter based on traffic changes almost weekly now, I can't see how Amy claim of “stickiness” exists in this space. https://openrouter.ai/rankings https://openrouter.ai/rankings

by dakolli 8mo ago

jasondigitized 8mo ago

So like....every business having electricity? I am not a economist so would love someone smarter than me explain how this is any different than the advent of electricity and how that affected labor.

shimman 8mo ago
The difference is that electricity wasn't being controlled by oligarchs that want to shape society so they become more rich while pillaging the planet and hurting/killing real human beings. I'd be more trusting of LLM companies if they were all workplace democracies, not really a big fan of the centrally planned monarchies that seem to be most US corporations.
- vel0city 8mo ago
  I mean your description sounds a lot like the early history of large industrialization of electricity. Lots of questionable safety and labor practices, proprietary systems, misinformation, doing absolutely terrible things to the environment to fuel this demand, massive monopolies, etc.
- wedog6 8mo ago
  Heard of Carnegie? He controlled coal when it was the main fuel used for heating and electricity.
  - shimman 8mo ago
    Did Carnegie try to overthrow a democracy and believe in monarchism?
  - HalfCrimp 8mo ago
    A reference to one of the hall of fame Robber Barons does seem pretty apt right now..
    - genghisjahn 8mo ago
      At least they built libraries, cultural centers and the occasional university.
      - toyg 8mo ago
        Nowadays they just try to put more whiteys on the moon, or sabotage liberal democracy.
      - codebje 8mo ago
        Give the current crop a chance to realise their mortality and want to secure a better legacy than 'took all the money'.
        andyferris 8mo ago
trollbridge 8mo ago
An obvious argument to this is that electricity is becoming a lot more expensive (because of LLMs), so how is that going to affect labour?

noshitsherlock 8mo ago

Yeah, but a Stratocaster guitar is available to everybody too, but not everybody’s an Eric Clapton

noshitsherlock 8mo ago
I can buy the CD From the Cradle for pennies, but it would cost me hundreds of dollars to see Eric Clapton live
user3939382 8mo ago
This is correct. An LLM is a tool. Having a better guitar doesn’t make you sound good if you don’t know how to play. If you were a low skill software systems etc arch before LLM you’re gonna be a bad one after as well. Someone at some point is deciding what the agent should be doing. LLMs compete more with entry level / juniors.

RobertoG 8mo ago

The price of oil at the price of water (ecology apart) should be a good thing. Automation should be, obviously, a good thing, because more is produced with less labor. What it says of ourselves and our politics that so many people (me included) are afraid of it? In a sane world, we would realize that, in a post-work world, the owner of the robots have all the power, so the robots should be owned in common. The solution is political.

dakolli 8mo ago
Throughout history Empires have bet their entire futures on the predictions of seers, magicians and done so with enthusiasm. When political leaders think their court magicians can give them an edge, they'll throw the baby out with the bathwater to take advantage of it. It seems to me that the Machine Learning engineers and AI companies are the court magicians of our time. I certainly don't have much faith in the current political structures, they're uneducated on most subjects they're in charge of and taking the magicians at their word, the magicians have just gotten smarter and don't call it magic anymore. I would actually call it magic though, just actually real. Imagine explaining to political strategists from 100 years ago, the ability to influence politicians remotely, while they sit in a room by themselves a la dictating what target politicians see on their phones and feed them content to steer them in a certain directions.. Its almost like a synthetic remote viewing.. And if that doesn't work, you also have buckets of cash :|
K0balt 8mo ago
While I agree, I am not hopeful. The incentive alignment has us careening towards Elysium rather than Star Trek.
yoz-y 8mo ago
What do we “need” more of? Here in France we need more doctors, more nurseries, more teachers… I don’t see AI helping much there in short to middle term (with teachers all research points to AI making it massively worse even) Globally I think we need better access to quality nutrition and more affordable medicine. Generally cheaper energy.
- 8mo ago

conception 8mo ago

I have never been in an organization where everyone was sitting around, wondering what to do next. If the economy was actually as good as certain government officials claimed to be, we would be hiring people left and right to be able to do three times as much work, not firing.

dakolli 8mo ago
That's the thing, profits and equities are at all time highs, but these companies have laid off 400k SWEs in the last 16 months in the US, which should tell you what their plans are for this technology and augmenting their businesses.
- falkensmaize 8mo ago
  The last 16 months of layoffs are almost certainly not because of LLMs. All the cheap money went away, and suddenly tech companies have to be profitable. That means a lot of them are shedding anything not nailed down to make their quarter look better.
  - DrewADesign 8mo ago
    The point is there’s no close positive correlation at that scale between labor and profits — hence the layoffs while these companies are doing better than ever. There’s zero reason to think increased productivity would lead to vastly more output from the company with the same amount of workers rather than far fewer workers and about the same amount of output, which is probably driven more by the market than a supply bottleneck.

hughw 8mo ago

Retail water[1] costs $881/bbl which is 13x the price of Brent crude. [1] https://www.walmart.com/ip/Aquafina-Purified-Drinking-Water-12-oz-Bottles-8-pk/8639571244?classType=REGULAR https://www.walmart.com/ip/Aquafina-Purified-Drinking-Water-...

dakolli 8mo ago
What a good faith reply. If you sincerely believe this, that's a good insight into how dumb the masses are. Although I would expect a higher quality of reply on HN. You found the most expensive 8pck of water on Walmart. Anyone can put a listing on Walmart, its the same model as Amazon. There's also a listing right below for bottles twice the size, and a 32 pack for a dollar less. It cost $0.001 per gallon out of your tap, and you know this..
- oliyoung 8mo ago
  I'm in South Australia, the driest state on the driest continent, we have a backup desalination plant and water security is common on the political agenda - water is probably as expensive here than most places in the world "The 2025-26 water use price for commercial customers is now $3.365/kL (or $0.003365 per litre)" https://www.sawater.com.au/my-account/water-and-sewerage-prices/water-prices/commercial-water-prices https://www.sawater.com.au/my-account/water-and-sewerage-pri...
- hughw 8mo ago
  Water just comes out of a tap? My household water comes from a 500 ft well on my property requiring a submersible pump costing $5000 that gets replaced ever 10-15 years or so with a rig and service that cost another 10k. Call it $1000/year... but it also requires a giant water softener, in my case a commercial one that amortizes out to $1000/year, and monthly expenditure of $70 for salt (admittedly I have exceptionally hard water). And of course, I, and your municipality too, don't (usually) pay any royalties to "owners" of water that we extract. Water is, rightly, expensive, and not even expensive enough.
  - not_kurt_godel 8mo ago

wiredpancake 8mo ago

[dead]

guyomes 8mo ago

> They can get rid of 1/3-2/3s of their labor and make the same amount of money, why wouldn't they. Competition may encourage companies to keep their labor. For example, in the video game industry, if the competitors of a company start shipping their games to all consoles at once, the company might want to do the same. Or if independent studios start shipping triple A games, a big studio may want to keep their labor to create quintuple A games. On the other hand, even in an optimistic scenario where labor is still required, the skills required for the jobs might change. And since the AI tools are not mature yet, it is difficult to know which new skills will be useful in ten years from now, and it is even more difficult to start training for those new skills now. With the help of AI tools, what would a quintuple A game look like? Maybe once we see some companies shipping quintuple A games that have commercial success, we might have some ideas on what new skills could be useful in the video game industry for example.

DrewADesign 8mo ago
Yeah but there’s no reason to assume this is even a possibility. SW Companies that are making more money than ever are slashing their workforces. Those garbage Coke and McDonald’s commercials clearly show big industry is trying to normalize bad quality rather than elevate their output. In theory, cheap overseas tweening shops should have allowed the midcentury American cartoon industry to make incredible quality at the same price, but instead, there was a race straight to the bottom. I’d love to have even a shred of hope that the future you describe is possible but I see zero empirical evidence that anyone is even considering it.

mbrumlow 8mo ago

> They can get rid of 1/3-2/3s of their labor and make the same amount of money, why wouldn't they. Because companies want to make MORE money. Your hypothetical company is now competing with another company who didn’t opposite, and now they get to market faster, fix bugs faster, add feature faster, and responding to changes in the industry faster. Which results in them making more, while your employ less company is just status quo. Also. With regards to oil, the consumption of oil increases as it became cheaper. With AI we now have a chance to do projects that simply would have cost way too much to do 10 years ago.

rglullis 8mo ago
> Which results in them making more Not necessarily. You are assuming that the people can consume whatever is put in front of them. Markets get saturated fast. The "changes in the industry" mean nothing.
- DrewADesign 8mo ago
  A) People are so used to infinite growth that it’s hard to imagine a market where that doesn’t exist. The industry can have enough developers and there’s a good chance we’re going to crash right the fuck into that pretty quickly. America’s industrial labor pool seemed like it provided an ever-expanding supply of jobs right up until it didn’t. Then, in the 80s, it started going backwards preeeetttty dramatically. B) No amount of money will make people buy something that doesn’t add value to or enrich their lives. You still need ideas, for things in markets that have room for those ideas. This is where product design comes in. Despite what many developers think, there are many kinds of designers in this industry and most of them are not the software equivalent of interior decorators. Designing good products is hard, and image generators don’t make that easier.
  - dakolli 8mo ago
    Its really wild how much good UI stands out to me now that the internet is been flooded with generically produced slop. I created a bookmarks folder for beautiful sites that clearly weren't created by LLMs and required a ton of sweat to design the UI/UX. I think we will transition to a world where handmade software/design will come at a huge premium (especially as the average person gets more distanced from the actual work required to do so, and the skills become rarer). Just like the wealthy pay for handmade shoes, as opposed to something off the shelf from footlocker, I think companies will revert back to hand crafted UX. These identical center column layout's with a 3x3 feature card grid at the bottom of your landing page are going to get really old fast in a sea of identical design patterns. To be fair component libraries were already contributing to this degradation in design quality, but LLM s are making it much worse.

josephg 8mo ago

> Its also worth noting that if you can create a business with an LLM, so can everyone else. And sadly everyone has the same ideas Yeah, this is quite thought provoking. If computer code written by LLMs is a commodity, what new businesses does that enable? What can we do cheaply we couldn't do before? One obvious answer is we can make a lot more custom stuff. Like, why buy Windows and Office when I can just ask claude to write me my own versions instead? Why run a commodity operating system on kiosks? We can make so many more one-off pieces of software. The fact software has been so expensive to write over the last few decades has forced software developers to think a lot about how to collaborate. We reuse code as much as we can - in shared libraries, common operating systems & APIs, cloud services (eg AWS) and so on. And these solutions all come with downsides - like supply chain attacks, subscription fees and service outages. LLMs can let every project invent its own tree of dependencies. Which is equal parts great and terrifying. There's that old line that businesses should "commoditise their compliment". If you're amazon, you want package delivery services to be cheap and competitive. If software is the commodity, what is the bespoke value-added service that can sit on top of all that?

pixelatedindex 8mo ago
> If software is the commodity, what is the bespoke value-added service that can sit on top of all that? It would be cool if I can brew hardware at home by getting AI to design and 3D print circuit boards with bespoke software. Alas, we are constrained by physics. At the moment.
echelon 8mo ago
> Yeah, this is quite thought provoking. If computer code written by LLMs is a commodity, what new businesses does that enable? What can we do cheaply we couldn't do before? The model owner can just withhold access and build all the businesses themselves. Financial capital used to need labor capital. It doesn't anymore. We're entering into scary territory. I would feel much better if this were all open source, but of course it isn't.
- cardine 8mo ago
  I think this risk is much lower in a world where there are lots of different model owners competing with each other, which is how it appears to be playing out.

leonflexo 8mo ago

> Its also worth noting that if you can create a business with an LLM, so can everyone else. And sadly everyone has the same ideas Yeah, people are going to have to come to terms with the "idea" equivalent of "there are no unique experiences". We're already seeing the bulk move toward the meta SaaS (Shovels as a Service).

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

tjr 8mo ago

Its also worth noting that if you can create a business with an LLM, so can everyone else. One possibility may be that we normalize making bigger, more complex things. In pre-LLM days, if I whipped up an application in something like 8 hours, it would be a pretty safe assumption that someone else could easily copy it. If it took me more like 40 hours, I still have no serious moat, but fewer people would bother spending 40 hours to copy an existing application. If it took me 100 hours, or 200 hours, fewer and fewer people would bother trying to copy it. Now, with LLMs... what still takes 40+ hours to build?

FuckButtons 8mo ago
The arrow of time leads towards complexity. There is no reason to assume anything otherwise.

onlyrealcuzzo 8mo ago

Last I checked, the tractor and plow are doing a lot more work than 3 farmers, yet we've got more jobs and grow more food. People will find work to do, whether that means there's tens of thousands of independent contractors, whether that means people migrate into new fields, or whether that means there's tens of multi-trillion dollar companies that would've had 200k engineers each that now only have 50k each and it's basically a net nothing. People will be fine. There might be big bumps in the road. Doom is definitely not certain.

theappsecguy 8mo ago
More jobs where? In farming? Is that why farming in the US is dying, being destroyed by corporations and farmers are now prisoners to John Deer? It’s hilarious that you chose possibly the worst counter example here…
- satvikpendem 8mo ago
  More output, not more farmers. The stratification of labor in civilization is built on this concept, because if not for more food, we'd have more "farmer jobs" of course, because everyone would be subsistence farming...
  - intended 8mo ago
    That’s not the statement made by the grand parent comment tho. That comment reads as stating an increase in farming jobs.
zaphirplane 8mo ago
Wow you are making a point of everything will be ok using farming ! Farming is struggling consolidated to big big players and subsidies keep it going You get layed off and spend 2-3 years migrating to another job type what do you think g that will do to your life or family. Those starting will have a paused life those 10 fro retirement are stuffed.
nl 8mo ago

benlivengood 8mo ago

decreasing COGS creates wealth and consumer surplus, though. If we can flatten the social hierarchy to reduce the need for social mobility then that kills two birds with one stone.

dakolli 8mo ago
Do you really think the ruling class has any plans to allow that to happen... There's a reason so much surveillance tech is being rolled out across the world. If the world needs 1/3 of the labor to sustain the ruling class's desires, they will try to reduce the amount of extra humans. I'm certain of this. My guess is during this "2nd industrial revolution" they will make young men so poor through the alienation of their labor that they beg to fight in a war. In that process they will get young men (and women) to secure resources for the ruling class and purge themselves in the process.
intended 8mo ago
In a simplified economic model though.

a_tartaruga 8mo ago

I don't disagree with everything you are saying. But you seem to be assuming that contributing to technology is a zero sum game when it concretely grows the wealth of the world. > If everyone had an oil well on their property that was affordable to operate the price of oil would be more akin to the price of water. This is not necessarily even true https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

pvab3 8mo ago
Jevon's Paradox is know as a paradox for a reason. It's not "Jevon's Law that totally makes sense and always happens".

ctoth 8mo ago

> And sadly everyone has the same ideas, everyone ends up working on the same things This is someone telling you they have never had an idea that surprised them. Or more charitably, they've never been around people whose ideas surprised them. Their entire model of "what gets built" is "the obvious thing that anyone would build given the tools." No concept of taste, aesthetic judgment, problem selection, weird domain collisions, or the simple fact that most genuinely valuable things were built by people whose friends said "why would you do that?"

dakolli 8mo ago
I'm speaking about the vast majority of people, who yes, build the same things. Look at any HN post over the last 6 months and you'll see everyone sharing clones of the same product. Yes some ideas or novel, I would argue that LLMs destroy or atrophy the creative muscle in people, much like how GPS powered apps destroyed people's mental navigation "muscles". I would also argue that very few unique valuable "things" built by people ever had people saying "Why would you build that". Unless we're talking about paradigm shifting products that are hard for people to imagine, like a vacuum cleaner in the 1800s. But guess what, llms aren't going to help you build those things.. They can create shitty images, clones of SaaS products that have been built 50x over, and all around encourage people to be mediocre and destroy their creativity as their brains atrophy from their use.

alexpotato 8mo ago

> Its also worth noting that if you can create a business with an LLM, so can everyone else. And sadly everyone has the same ideas, everyone ends up working on the same things causing competition to push margins to nothing. This was true before LLMs. For example, anyone can open a restaurant (or a food truck). That doesn't mean that all restaurants are good or consistent or match what people want. Heck, you could do all of those things but if your prices are too low then you go out of business. A more specific example with regards to coding: We had books, courses, YouTube videos, coding boot camps etc but it's estimated that even at the PEAK of developer pay less than 5% of the US adult working population could write even a basic "Hello World" program in any language. In other words, I'm skeptical of "everyone will be making the same thing" (emphasis on the "everyone").

root_axis 8mo ago

> Its also worth noting that if you can create a business with an LLM If that were true, LLM companies would just use it themselves to make money rather than sell and give away access to the models at a loss.

bandrami 8mo ago

Which leads to the uncomfortable but difficult to avoid conclusion that having some friction in the production of code was actually helping because it was keeping people from implementing bad ideas.

xhrpost 8mo ago

There's an older article that gets reposted to HN occasionally, titled something like "I hate almost all software". I'm probably more cynical than the average tech user and I relate strongly to the sentiment. So so much software is inexcusably bad from a UX perspective. So I have to ask, if code will really become this dirt cheap unlimited commodity, will we actually have good software?

ethbr1 8mo ago
Depends on whether you think good software comes from good initial design (then yes, via the monkeys with typewriters path) or intentional feature evolution (then no, because that's a more artistic, skilled endeavor). Anyone who lived through 90s OSS UX and MySpace would likely agree that design taste is unevenly distributed throughout the population.

sp1nningaway 8mo ago

Here is a very real example of how an LLM can at least save, if not create jobs, and also not take a programmers job: I work for a cash-strapped nonprofit. We have a business idea that can scale up a service we already offer. The new product is going to need coding, possibly a full-scale app. We don't have any capacity to do it in-house and don't have an easy way to find or afford vendor that can work on this somewhat niche product. I don't have the time to help develop this product but I'm VERY confident an LLM will be able to deliver what we need faster and at a lower cost than a contractor. This will save money we couldn't afford to gamble on an untested product AND potentially create several positions that don't currently exist in our org to support the new product.

spankalee 8mo ago
Do you have someone who can babysit and review what the LLM does? Otherwise, I'm not sure we're at the point where you can just tell an agent to go off and build something and it does it _correctly_. IME, you'll just get demoware if you don't have the time and attention to detail to really manage the process.
lyu07282 8mo ago
But if you could afford to hire a worker for this job, that an LLM would be able to do for a fraction of the cost (by your estimation), then why on earth would you ever waste money on a worker? By extension if you pay a worker and an AI or robot comes along that can do the work for cheaper, then why would you not fire the worker and replace them with the cheaper alternative? Its kind of funny to see capitalists brains all over this thread desperately try to make it make sense. It's almost like the system is broken, but that can't possibly be right everybody believes in capitalism, everybody can't be wrong. Wake the fuck up.
- sp1nningaway 8mo ago
  New people hired for this project would not be coders. They would be an expert in the service we offer, and would be doing work an LLM is not capable of. I don't know if LLMs would be capable of also doing that job in the future, but my org (a mission-driven non profit) can get very real value from LLMs right now, and it's not a zero-sum value that takes someone's job away.

majormajor 8mo ago

> Their goal is to monopolize labor for anything that has to do with i/o on a computer, which is way more than SWE. Its simple, this technology literally cannot create new jobs it simply can cause one engineer (or any worker whos job has to do with computer i/o) to do the work of 3, therefore allowing you to replace workers (and overwork the ones you keep). Companies don't need "more work" half the "features"/"products" that companies produce is already just extra. They can get rid of 1/3-2/3s of their labor and make the same amount of money, why wouldn't they. Most companies have "want to do" lists much longer than what actually gets done. I think the question for many will be is it actually useful to do that. For instance, there's only so much feature-rollout/user-interface churn that users will tolerate for software products. Or, for a non-software company that has had a backlog full of things like "investigate and find a new ERP system", how long will that backlog be able to keep being populated.

eru 8mo ago

> Their goal is to monopolize labor for anything that has to do with i/o on a computer, which is way more than SWE. Its simple, this technology literally cannot create new jobs it simply can cause one engineer (or any worker whos job has to do with computer i/o) to do the work of 3, therefore allowing you to replace workers (and overwork the ones you keep). Companies don't need "more work" half the "features"/"products" that companies produce is already just extra. They can get rid of 1/3-2/3s of their labor and make the same amount of money, why wouldn't they. Yes, that's how technology works in general. It's good and intended. You can't have baristas (for all but the extremely rich), when 90%+ of people are farmers. > ZeroHedge on twitter said the following: Oh, ZeroHedge. I guess we can stop any discussion now..

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
danelski 8mo ago
The baristas example can only make me think that with the growing wealth disparity and no obvious exit path for white collars we might see a big return of servant-like jobs for below 1%. Who wouldn't want to wake up and daily assist life of some remaining upper-middle class Anthropic's employee?
- eru 8mo ago
  What growing wealth disparity? Btw, globally equality hasn't looked better in probably more than a century by now. Especially in terms of real consumption.
  - danelski 8mo ago
    Sorry, I don't see your point. While lifting up the masses out of extreme poverty globally is obviously good, it doesn't transfer to your situation unless you happen to live in one of these upstart countries. The society you live in is not global, even if we share more of popculture and technology now.

vintermann 8mo ago

Reply to your edit: what if we wanted to do with the water was simply to drink it? "Meritocratic climbing on the social ladder", I'm sorry but what are you on about?? As if that was the meaning in life? As if that was even a goal in itself? If it's one thing we need to learn in the age of AI, it's not to confuse the means to an end and the end itself!

whiplash451 8mo ago

> And sadly everyone has the same ideas I'm not sure that's true. If LLMs can help researchers implement (not find) new ideas faster, they effectively accelerate the progress of research. Like many other technologies, LLMs will fail in areas and succeed in others. I agree with your take regarding business ideas, but the story could be different for scientific discovery.

dakolli 8mo ago
One thing that's clear, LLMs cannot come up with novel ideas.

dr_dshiv 8mo ago

I don’t think we are running out of work to do… there seems to be an endless amount of work to be done. And most of it comes from human needs and desires.

rhubarbtree 8mo ago

If one person can do the job of three, then you can keep output the same and reduce headcount, or maintain headcount and improve output etc. Anecdotally it seems demand for software >> supply of software. So in engineering, I think we’ll see way more software. That’s what happened in the Industrial Revolution. Far more products, multiple orders of magnitude more, were produced. The Industrial Revolution was deeply disruptive to labour, even whilst creating huge wealth and jobs. Retraining is the real problem. That’s what we will see in software. If you can’t architect and think well, you’ll struggle. Being able to write boiler plate and repetitive low level code is a thing of the past. But there are jobs - you’re going to have to work hard to land them. Now, if AGI or superintelligence somehow renders all humans obsolete, that is a very different problem but that is also the end of capitalism so will be down to governments to address.

torginus 8mo ago

This is just a theory of mine, but the fact that people don't see LLMs as something that will grow the pie and increase their output leading to prosperity for all just means that real economic growth has stagnated. From all my interactions with C-level people as an engineer, what I learned from their mindset is their primary focus is growing their business - market entry, bringing out new products, new revenue streams. As an engineer I really love optimizing out current infra, bringing out tools and improved workflows, which many of my colleagues have considered a godsend, but it seems from a C-level perspective, it's just a minor nice-to-have. While I don't necessarily agree with their world-view, some part of it is undeniable - you can easily build an IT company with very high margins - say 3x revenue/expense ratio, in this case growing the profit is a much more lucrative way of growing the company.

vaeyshl 8mo ago

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arthurcolle 8mo ago

> Its also worth noting that if you can create a business with an LLM, so can everyone else. False. Anyone can learn about index ETFs and still yolo into 3DTE options and promptly get variation margined out of existence. Discipline and contextual reasoning in humans is not dependent on the tools they are using, and I think the take is completely and definitively wrong.

dakolli 8mo ago
*Checks Bio* Owns AI company and.... the whole family tree's portfolio :eyes:

sithamet 8mo ago

> everyone has access to the same models and basic thought processes Why haven't Warners acquired Netflix then, but the other way around? Even though they had access to the same labor market, a human LLM replacement? I think real economics is a little more complex than the "basic economics" referenced in your reply. This does not negate the possibility that enterprises will double down on replacing everyone with AI, though. But it does negate the reasoning behind the claim and the predictions made.

pickleRick243 8mo ago

I always find these "anti-AI" AI believer takes fascinating. If true AGI (which you are describing) comes to pass, there will certainly be massive societal consequences, and I'm not saying there won't be any dangers. But the economics in the resulting post-scarcity regime will be so far removed from our current world that I doubt any of this economic analysis will be even close to the mark. I think the disconnect is that you are imagining a world where somehow LLMs are able to one-shot web businesses, but robotics and real-world tech is left untouched. Once LLMs can publish in top math/physics journals with little human assistance, it's a small step to dominating NeurIPS and getting us out of our mini-winter in robotics/RL. We're going to have Skynet or Star Trek, not the current weird situation where poor people can't afford healthy food, but can afford a smartphone.

rkomorn 8mo ago
> We're going to have Skynet or Star Trek Star Trek only got a good society after an awful war, so neither of these options are good.
- ramraj07 8mo ago
  Star Trek only got a good society after discovering FTL and existence of all manner of alien societies. And even after that Star Treks story motivations on why we turned good sound quite implausible given what we know about human nature and history. No effing way it will ever happen even if we discover aliens. Its just a wishful fever dream.
  - rkomorn 8mo ago
    I'm definitely not a Star Trek connoisseur but I thought a big part of the lore is the "never again"-ish response to the wars through WW3? But anyway, I share your lack of optimism.
    - dakolli 8mo ago
      Well they didn't necessarily stop waging war in Star Trek either.. They also spent most of their time trying to not get defeated by parasitic artificial intelligence.

gymbeaux 8mo ago

I have a few app ideas that I've been sitting on for years and they would all be things that would help me, things that I would actually use.. But they're also things that I think others would find useful. I had Claude Code create two of them so far, and yeah the code isn't what I would write, but the apps generally work and are useful to me. The idea of trying to monetize these apps that I didn't even write is strange to me, especially considering anyone else can just tell their Claude Code to "create an app that's a clone of appwebsite.com" and within an hour they will probably have a virtually identical clone of my app that I'm trying to charge money for. In this way, AI coding is a bummer. I also sincerely miss writing code. Merely reading it (or being a QA and telling Claude about bugs I find) is a shell of what software engineering used to be. I know with apps especially, all that really matters is how large your user base is, but to spend all that time and money getting the user base, only for them to jump ship next month for an even better vibe-coded solution... eh. I don't have any answers, I just agree that everyone has the same ideas and it's just going to be another form of enshittification. "My AI slop is better than your AI slop".

slashdev 8mo ago

It's not as easy to build a business as just copying someone (otherwise we'd have all been doing that long before LLMs). I expect the software market will change from lots of big kitchen sink included systems and services to many smaller more specialized solutions with small agile teams behind them. Some engineers that lose their jobs are going to create new businesses and new jobs. The question in my mind: is there enough feature and software demand out there to keep all of the engineers employed at 3x the productivity? Maybe. Software has been limited on the supply side by how expensive it was to produce. Now it may bump into limits on the demand side instead. Meanwhile LLMs are better than junior devs, so nobody wants to hire a junior dev. No idea how we get senior devs then. How many people will be scared away from entering this career path? The job has changed. How many software engineers will leave the career now that the job is more of a technically minded product person and code reviewer? I can't predict how it all plays out, but I'm along for the ride. Grieving the loss of programming and trying to get used to this new world.

kiriakosv 8mo ago

This worldview has, IMO, one omission. It implicitly assumes that everything will stay the same except for LLMs getting better and better, but in reality there are many interconnected factors in play. Will it fundamentally change or eliminate some jobs? I think yes. But at the same time, no one knows how this will play out in the long run. We certainly shouldn't extrapolate what will happen in the job market or society by treating AI performance as an independent variable.

motbus3 8mo ago

Edit: This ended up being such a big text. Sorry. I guess I agree but I want to add to your point is that, this tech is inexpensive. And unfortunately, not in the sense where it is related to the real value of a product or need for it, but as a market condition. But, to me, it seems that it will be more expensive anyway. I see these possibilities: 1. Few companies own all the technology. They cut the men in the middle and they have all kinds of super apps and will try to force into that ecosystem 2. Or, they succeeded in the substitution, they keep the man in the middle but they control whom will have access and how much it is going to be charged. The goal in this case will be to be more expensive to kickstart an engineering team than using the product and ofc, their goal will be to reach that threshold. 3. They completely fail, these businesses plateau'ed and they can't make it a better condition to subvert the current balance and take the market. This could happen if a big financial risk materialize or if they get stuck without big advancements for a long time and investors starts to demand their money back. I think we are going this 3rd route. We are seeing early signals of nonsense marketing strategy selling things that are not there yet. We see all of them silencing ethics and transparency teams. The truth is that they started to stack models together and sell as one thing which is much different from what they sold just a year and a half ago. I am not saying this couldn't be because this is really the best model, but because they couldn't scale it up even more now, even 18 months after the previous gen of giant model releases. The truth is that they probably need to start capitalising now because the crisis they are causing themselves might hurt them bad. We saw this decline or every bubble popping. They need to sell it too much so they can shift the risk from being on top of their money to be on top of someone else's money, and this potential is resold multiple times as investors realise the improvements are not coming. Until there is only the speculators dealing with this sorta of business, which will ultimately make those companies to take unpopular stupid decisions like it happened with bitcoin, super hero movies, NFT and maybe much more if I could think about it.

astrange 8mo ago

> Its simple, this technology literally cannot create new jobs it simply can cause one engineer (or any worker whos job has to do with computer i/o) to do the work of 3 That is a productivity improvement, which tends to increase employment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

runeks 8mo ago

> Companies don't need "more work" half the "features"/"products" that companies produce is already just extra. At my company we have a huge backlog where only the top of that iceberg is pulled every iteration to keep customers happy. If they fired 90% of the engineers assuming a 10x increase in productivity, they might be able to offer their product at half the price. But if they keep all their engineers they'd get 10x the features and could probably charge twice as much for it.

lumost 8mo ago

This really points to a world where all services are too cheap to meter. The compute side of AI is a commodity, the usage of AI is a commodity, the model development of AI is a commodity. So far there is no evidence that a provider with heavy usage has any long-term advantage over a vendor with no usage. New top tier models come out every week from relative unknowns. Other than a vast consolidation of what parts of the economy are "digital", what is going to have margin other than orphaned capital and "creative" efforts within 10 years? EDIT: the top ranked model on openrouter based on traffic changes almost weekly now, I can't see how Amy claim of “stickiness” exists in this space. https://openrouter.ai/rankings https://openrouter.ai/rankings