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I replaced a $22/hr worker entirely with AI. And it costs me about $0.18/hr instead. The AI does a better job, is more reliable and consistent. The human was co

I replaced a $22/hr worker entirely with AI. And it costs me about $0.18/hr instead. The AI does a better job, is more reliable and consistent. The human was constantly behind schedule, made frequent mistakes, and also humans get sick, or call off work for other reasons. So yes, AI is a bubble, but this bubble has generated value, it’s not at all like 2008.

akomtu 7mo ago
The value is negative to that worker, apparently.
- VladVladikoff 7mo ago
  Society on the whole, but this isn’t the first time I have automated away jobs, I have been doing it for years long before we had LLMs every where. In my opinion it is the only way to sustainably grow a company. Identify your biggest man hour costs and find a way to automate away those tasks.
  - akomtu 7mo ago
    Society as a whole is those workers. Capital, efficiency, GDP and similar things may be sky high, but the actual people will suffer.
chriscc 7mo ago
Just curious, what did your human worker do that you were able to entirely automate?
- floralhangnail 7mo ago
  My bet is something administrative, like reminding people to approve their timesheets for payroll. AI wouldn't be needed to replace that job though, just a recurring calendar event.
- VladVladikoff 7mo ago
  Reviewing of images and video that is uploaded to my website.
monodeldiablo 7mo ago
$0.18/hr is the (massively) subsidized price of AI services. Once these companies are required to turn a profit for their investors, they'll raise the price. Then the math doesn't look so lopsided. We're already seeing this process unfold with token windows and ad rollout.
- joegibbs 7mo ago
  It's not that subsidised, this is just wishful thinking. You can run a local model like Qwen for equivalent prices. You might see it go up to $0.50/hr but you're definitely not going to see it at $22
  - monodeldiablo 7mo ago
    I do run open models locally, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking that they're functionally competitive. I'm extremely skeptical of anybody claiming they've obviated a $22/hr job with an open model. Qwen is a big step down in capability. I can play with something like k2.5 for awhile, but if I want real work done I'm going back to a frontier model, which has significant runtime requirements for inference. You're also ignoring the cost of purchasing and amortizing dedicated hardware in your local model example. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison.
- kcb 7mo ago
  Inference isn't really that expensive, its the training of new foundational models that is. With whatever highly optimized setup the big providers are using, they should be able to pack quite a lot of concurrent users onto a deployment of a model. Just think too, it's very possible their use case would be served just fine by a 100B model deployed to a $4,000 DGX Spark.
falkensmaize 7mo ago
I too, want to hear details about what this person did that they could be replaced completely with LLMs.
- VladVladikoff 7mo ago
  Reviewing of images and video that is uploaded to my website.

akomtu 7mo ago

The value is negative to that worker, apparently.

VladVladikoff 7mo ago
Society on the whole, but this isn’t the first time I have automated away jobs, I have been doing it for years long before we had LLMs every where. In my opinion it is the only way to sustainably grow a company. Identify your biggest man hour costs and find a way to automate away those tasks.
- akomtu 7mo ago
  Society as a whole is those workers. Capital, efficiency, GDP and similar things may be sky high, but the actual people will suffer.

chriscc 7mo ago

Just curious, what did your human worker do that you were able to entirely automate?

floralhangnail 7mo ago
My bet is something administrative, like reminding people to approve their timesheets for payroll. AI wouldn't be needed to replace that job though, just a recurring calendar event.
VladVladikoff 7mo ago
Reviewing of images and video that is uploaded to my website.

monodeldiablo 7mo ago

$0.18/hr is the (massively) subsidized price of AI services. Once these companies are required to turn a profit for their investors, they'll raise the price. Then the math doesn't look so lopsided. We're already seeing this process unfold with token windows and ad rollout.

joegibbs 7mo ago
It's not that subsidised, this is just wishful thinking. You can run a local model like Qwen for equivalent prices. You might see it go up to $0.50/hr but you're definitely not going to see it at $22
- monodeldiablo 7mo ago
  I do run open models locally, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking that they're functionally competitive. I'm extremely skeptical of anybody claiming they've obviated a $22/hr job with an open model. Qwen is a big step down in capability. I can play with something like k2.5 for awhile, but if I want real work done I'm going back to a frontier model, which has significant runtime requirements for inference. You're also ignoring the cost of purchasing and amortizing dedicated hardware in your local model example. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison.
kcb 7mo ago
Inference isn't really that expensive, its the training of new foundational models that is. With whatever highly optimized setup the big providers are using, they should be able to pack quite a lot of concurrent users onto a deployment of a model. Just think too, it's very possible their use case would be served just fine by a 100B model deployed to a $4,000 DGX Spark.

falkensmaize 7mo ago

I too, want to hear details about what this person did that they could be replaced completely with LLMs.

VladVladikoff 7mo ago
Reviewing of images and video that is uploaded to my website.