6 ms·

Until I see median real income start to actually go down, I just don't buy it. AI is currently a commodity. Maybe one of the labs will be able to differentiate

by bloppe 7mo ago

Until I see median real income start to actually go down, I just don't buy it. AI is currently a commodity. Maybe one of the labs will be able to differentiate sufficiently to be able to charge the kinds of premiums they need just to pay back their investors. Maybe, instead, we'll see something akin to the FOSS revolution, where large, high-quality, open training sets are developed to make sure there's always a fair alternative to the big players. Then who actually benefits from AI? Mainly users, not companies. In many ways, the bar to having a competitive advantage is actually lowering. I reckon in the future, simply avoiding a crippling social media addiction that sucks up 4-8 hours of every day will be enough to get rich.

shafyy 7mo ago
You can't just look at real median income. You also need to look at other factors like wealth inequality, housing prices and health care.
- bloppe 7mo ago
  housing prices and health care are captured by the "real" part of "median real income". Inequality is not, but as long as everybody is getting richer, I'm less concerned about inequality.
  - shafyy 7mo ago
    Inequality is still important even if everybody is getting richer (I disagree that everybody is getting richer, but that's a different discussion). Because wealth and power concentrated in the hand of a few means that a few have outsized influence on politics and society, which is very much eroding the fundaments of how a democracy is supposed to work. Furthermore, there are many studies showing that more wealth inequality results in more consumption in a society. Which is not good for many reasons.
- Antoniocl 7mo ago
  Well, I think in the context of the parent comment, separating out housing would risk overstating changes in its effect on purchasing power because increases to housing would already be captured by inflation (since we're talking about real median income, which is already inflation adjusted) I agree that housing affordability is a major problem and that looking at it independently could help you quantify if housing specifically has become more unaffordable, but that's a different question then whether the median person's overall purchasing power has declined (considering all of housing, healthcare food etc)
  - shafyy 7mo ago
    Yes housing prices are captured by inflation, but since housing prices are so different from region to region and city to city, just looking at a country-wide average median income does not say much.
trolleski 7mo ago
If you denominate your income in silly money such as USD, then it won't go down, probably will go up! However if you start asking questions on how much housing medical and materials it buys, then I think it will squeeze people even more than now.
- bloppe 7mo ago
  That's what the "real" in "median real income" means. It measures how much stuff you can buy, not how much currency you have. And it's been going up relatively reliably: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/mepainusa672n https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/mepainusa672n
  - willis936 7mo ago
    Median is obviously flawed here. What should be looked at is wealth distribution. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and anyone with any power is doing their best to accelerate this trend. https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/#range:2019.2,2025.3;quarter:144;series:Net%20worth;demographic:networth;population:1,3,5,7,9;units:shares https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
    - dahfizz 7mo ago
      No, the poor are also getting richer: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLB50107 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLB50107 You're looking at what percent of the total wealth pie do the poor get. But the pie itself is growing, and so is _everyones_ slice of the pie. Maybe you think its an inherent problem that some people get a bigger percent of the pie than others. But its objectively untrue to say that the poor are getting poorer.
      - willis936 7mo ago
        That stat is not real income. The dollars don't matter if they buy less.
    - 7mo ago
apercu 7mo ago
> Until I see median real income start to actually go down I'm not sure I understand this, it doesn't feel like what I have "lived" for the least 30 years. Median real income might not be down statistically, but the purchasing power of professional incomes relative to housing, education, and major life costs clearly feels lower than it did in the mid 90s. An inflation-adjusted six-figure salary today does not deliver the same lifestyle position it once did. Man... healthcare costs, too. Hell, even computers! Raw computing power per dollar is cheaper than ever, but the minimum spec required to function professionally has risen so much that the real cost of staying technologically current feels higher.
- BobaFloutist 7mo ago
  According to a random inflation calculator I found with a lazy Google search, $50,000 in 1996 is about $106,000 today. Was $50,000 a lot of money in 1996? Did it afford a nice house in a good neighborhood? Or is it that 6 figures just isn't what it used to be?
  - raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
    I had my first house built in the burbs of Atlanta - 2700 square feet 3-2 and a bonus room for $170k. Going by the house shouldn’t be more than 3.5x your income. That puts the necessary income less than $50K. Heck I had my second house built in the northern burbs of Atlanta in “the good school system” for $335k in 2016. We sold it in 2024 for exactly twice the price.
  - apercu 7mo ago
    I bought my first house in the 90s on a 65k base salary in an ok neighborhood in a great city. Anecdotally anyway.
tim-projects 7mo ago
I'm with you. If we all have access to AI then how is that a bridge being taken away? Doesn't that mean that a single person can more easily disrupt the status quo? All this stuff about genetics... I just don't think it's relevant at this point. Average intelligence and access to the internet is what most of the world has. It's the systems of money and law that are taking the bridge away not AI. But someone could invent new systems to replace the ones that don't serve the 99% Will most people go that far? Probably not. But the bridge is still there - unless they take the AI models away entirely. I think the only way the rich can stay rich with ai is if they just use AI to convince people that they can't do anything themselves. After all that's what the last century was about with respect to capitalism.
- tengada1 7mo ago
  I think my concern would be if the relationship between model intelligence and inference cost was altered very significantly. I sort of feel like we got lucky that AI isn't arbitrarily scalable in a single instance (i.e. if you could run a single LLM on an entire datacenter and it just immediately becomes a super genius versus running it on the minimum viable hardware i.e. some form of quantization on a local machine.) Obviously there's a sort of goldilocks zone / most appropriate substrate for an LLM to run on somewhere in between those two extremes (small cluster of tightly coupled flagship GPUs) So luckily enough the economics appear to work out to make that at least conceptually viable for even private members of the public to afford access to the same order of magnitude of LLM intelligence. But we're already seeing some departure from that. My concern would be if this curve was altered significantly by a new algorithmic approach beyond or instead of Transformerd such that someone with $200,000 to spare could achieve just like a completely categorically different quality of work, massively magnify their existing wealth advantage, because this would be a threat of the sort being discussed above, namely a pathway to a severe form of modern Feudalism.
adverbly 7mo ago
> Until I see median real income start to actually go down, I just don't buy it. Assuming you're intending "real" to mean the technical definition of "real" which is "adjusted for inflation", its basically been flat since 2019*, and that's using the government's inflation measures which abuse things like basket substitution and other hacks to hide the actual increases in the true cost of living. If you made better assumptions about inflation, you actually would see that median real income is down dramatically already over the past several decades. Here is a recent video on some of these measurement biases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B4tgG-CGXU&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B4tgG-CGXU&t=1s Source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
- bloppe 7mo ago
  Your assertion that it's "flat" is rather unconvincing after looking at that graph. It's clearly been rising relatively consistently. The dip for covid I think is especially understandable, and it's currently higher than it's ever been. Maybe your personal expenses are not reflected by the CPI, but you can see for yourself: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/2025.htm https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/2025.htm 44% housing, 8% medicine, 14% food. I don't see how these number are manipulated to the point of malicious data picking. They also publish their methodology.
  - adverbly 7mo ago
    Are you blind? 2019: 83260 2024: 83730
    - demaga 7mo ago
      2018: 77700
    - bloppe 7mo ago
      If you actually look at the rest of the graph, you'd quickly notice that 2 year dips are entirely normal. The overall trend is consistent. And it's risen over 5% in the last 4 years. Those are the 4 years since ChatGPT.
Balgair 7mo ago
[dead]
hypercube33 7mo ago
Sure but you have to run AI on something and today that's basically limited to multi-thosand dollar hardware - the price and effort to entry has to come down to make it make sense for normal consumers to move it out of the cloud to local.

by bloppe 7mo ago

shafyy 7mo ago

You can't just look at real median income. You also need to look at other factors like wealth inequality, housing prices and health care.

bloppe 7mo ago
housing prices and health care are captured by the "real" part of "median real income". Inequality is not, but as long as everybody is getting richer, I'm less concerned about inequality.
- shafyy 7mo ago
  Inequality is still important even if everybody is getting richer (I disagree that everybody is getting richer, but that's a different discussion). Because wealth and power concentrated in the hand of a few means that a few have outsized influence on politics and society, which is very much eroding the fundaments of how a democracy is supposed to work. Furthermore, there are many studies showing that more wealth inequality results in more consumption in a society. Which is not good for many reasons.
Antoniocl 7mo ago
Well, I think in the context of the parent comment, separating out housing would risk overstating changes in its effect on purchasing power because increases to housing would already be captured by inflation (since we're talking about real median income, which is already inflation adjusted) I agree that housing affordability is a major problem and that looking at it independently could help you quantify if housing specifically has become more unaffordable, but that's a different question then whether the median person's overall purchasing power has declined (considering all of housing, healthcare food etc)
- shafyy 7mo ago
  Yes housing prices are captured by inflation, but since housing prices are so different from region to region and city to city, just looking at a country-wide average median income does not say much.

trolleski 7mo ago

If you denominate your income in silly money such as USD, then it won't go down, probably will go up! However if you start asking questions on how much housing medical and materials it buys, then I think it will squeeze people even more than now.

bloppe 7mo ago
That's what the "real" in "median real income" means. It measures how much stuff you can buy, not how much currency you have. And it's been going up relatively reliably: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/mepainusa672n https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/mepainusa672n
- willis936 7mo ago
  Median is obviously flawed here. What should be looked at is wealth distribution. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and anyone with any power is doing their best to accelerate this trend. https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/#range:2019.2,2025.3;quarter:144;series:Net%20worth;demographic:networth;population:1,3,5,7,9;units:shares https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
  - dahfizz 7mo ago
    No, the poor are also getting richer: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLB50107 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLB50107 You're looking at what percent of the total wealth pie do the poor get. But the pie itself is growing, and so is _everyones_ slice of the pie. Maybe you think its an inherent problem that some people get a bigger percent of the pie than others. But its objectively untrue to say that the poor are getting poorer.
    - willis936 7mo ago
      That stat is not real income. The dollars don't matter if they buy less.
  - 7mo ago

apercu 7mo ago

> Until I see median real income start to actually go down I'm not sure I understand this, it doesn't feel like what I have "lived" for the least 30 years. Median real income might not be down statistically, but the purchasing power of professional incomes relative to housing, education, and major life costs clearly feels lower than it did in the mid 90s. An inflation-adjusted six-figure salary today does not deliver the same lifestyle position it once did. Man... healthcare costs, too. Hell, even computers! Raw computing power per dollar is cheaper than ever, but the minimum spec required to function professionally has risen so much that the real cost of staying technologically current feels higher.

BobaFloutist 7mo ago
According to a random inflation calculator I found with a lazy Google search, $50,000 in 1996 is about $106,000 today. Was $50,000 a lot of money in 1996? Did it afford a nice house in a good neighborhood? Or is it that 6 figures just isn't what it used to be?
- raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
  I had my first house built in the burbs of Atlanta - 2700 square feet 3-2 and a bonus room for $170k. Going by the house shouldn’t be more than 3.5x your income. That puts the necessary income less than $50K. Heck I had my second house built in the northern burbs of Atlanta in “the good school system” for $335k in 2016. We sold it in 2024 for exactly twice the price.
- apercu 7mo ago
  I bought my first house in the 90s on a 65k base salary in an ok neighborhood in a great city. Anecdotally anyway.

tim-projects 7mo ago

I'm with you. If we all have access to AI then how is that a bridge being taken away? Doesn't that mean that a single person can more easily disrupt the status quo? All this stuff about genetics... I just don't think it's relevant at this point. Average intelligence and access to the internet is what most of the world has. It's the systems of money and law that are taking the bridge away not AI. But someone could invent new systems to replace the ones that don't serve the 99% Will most people go that far? Probably not. But the bridge is still there - unless they take the AI models away entirely. I think the only way the rich can stay rich with ai is if they just use AI to convince people that they can't do anything themselves. After all that's what the last century was about with respect to capitalism.

tengada1 7mo ago
I think my concern would be if the relationship between model intelligence and inference cost was altered very significantly. I sort of feel like we got lucky that AI isn't arbitrarily scalable in a single instance (i.e. if you could run a single LLM on an entire datacenter and it just immediately becomes a super genius versus running it on the minimum viable hardware i.e. some form of quantization on a local machine.) Obviously there's a sort of goldilocks zone / most appropriate substrate for an LLM to run on somewhere in between those two extremes (small cluster of tightly coupled flagship GPUs) So luckily enough the economics appear to work out to make that at least conceptually viable for even private members of the public to afford access to the same order of magnitude of LLM intelligence. But we're already seeing some departure from that. My concern would be if this curve was altered significantly by a new algorithmic approach beyond or instead of Transformerd such that someone with $200,000 to spare could achieve just like a completely categorically different quality of work, massively magnify their existing wealth advantage, because this would be a threat of the sort being discussed above, namely a pathway to a severe form of modern Feudalism.

adverbly 7mo ago

> Until I see median real income start to actually go down, I just don't buy it. Assuming you're intending "real" to mean the technical definition of "real" which is "adjusted for inflation", its basically been flat since 2019*, and that's using the government's inflation measures which abuse things like basket substitution and other hacks to hide the actual increases in the true cost of living. If you made better assumptions about inflation, you actually would see that median real income is down dramatically already over the past several decades. Here is a recent video on some of these measurement biases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B4tgG-CGXU&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B4tgG-CGXU&t=1s Source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

bloppe 7mo ago
Your assertion that it's "flat" is rather unconvincing after looking at that graph. It's clearly been rising relatively consistently. The dip for covid I think is especially understandable, and it's currently higher than it's ever been. Maybe your personal expenses are not reflected by the CPI, but you can see for yourself: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/2025.htm https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/2025.htm 44% housing, 8% medicine, 14% food. I don't see how these number are manipulated to the point of malicious data picking. They also publish their methodology.
- adverbly 7mo ago
  Are you blind? 2019: 83260 2024: 83730
  - demaga 7mo ago
    2018: 77700
  - bloppe 7mo ago
    If you actually look at the rest of the graph, you'd quickly notice that 2 year dips are entirely normal. The overall trend is consistent. And it's risen over 5% in the last 4 years. Those are the 4 years since ChatGPT.

Balgair 7mo ago

[dead]

hypercube33 7mo ago

Sure but you have to run AI on something and today that's basically limited to multi-thosand dollar hardware - the price and effort to entry has to come down to make it make sense for normal consumers to move it out of the cloud to local.