Comment by monkeynotes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by monkeynotes | Hacker News Reader

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Hardly, they are burning money with TikSlop, they don't even know how to monetize it, just YOLO'd the product to keep investors interested.

Even the porn industry can't seem to monetize AI, so I doubt OpenAI who knows jack shit about this space will be able to.

Fact is generative AI is stupidly expensive to run, and I can't see mass adoption at subscription prices that actually allow them to break even.

I'm sure folks have seen the commentary on the cost of all this infrastructure. How can an LLM business model possibly pay for a nuclear power station, let alone the ongoing overheads of the rest of the infrastructure? The whole thing just seems like total fantasy.

I don't even think they believe they are going to reach AGI, and even if they did, and if companies did start hiring AI agents instead of humans, then what? If consumers are out of work, who the hell is going to keep the economy going?

I just don't understand how smart people think this is going to work out at all.

> I just don't understand how smart people think this is going to work out at all.

The previous couple of crops of smart people grew up in a world that could still easily be improved, and they set about doing just that. The current crop of smart people grew up in a world with a very large number of people and they want a bigger slice of it. There are only a couple of solutions to that and it's pretty clear to me which way they've picked.

They don't need to 'keep the economy running' for that much longer to get their way.

> I just don't understand how smart people think this is going to work out at all.

Thats the thing, they arent looking at the big picture or long term. They are looking to get a slice of the pie after seeing companies like Tesla and Uber milk the market for billions. In a market where everything from shelter to food is blowing up in cost, people struggle to provide/have a life similar to their parents.

How can you take the market for billions when you are investing hundreds and hundreds of billions? Amazon overtook Walmart and cloud computing, they have a solid business model, and I doubt even a business that size could pay down that outlay. Are we really saying that by some miracle OpenAI, or Anthropic are going to find a use case that would make places like Amazon and Apple look like relatively small business?

> Are we really saying that by some miracle OpenAI, or Anthropic are going to find a use case that would make places like Amazon and Apple look like relatively small business?

I thought the replacement of all desk jobs was supposed to be that joking not joking usecase

> If consumers are out of work, who the hell is going to keep the economy going?

There is a whole field of research called post scarcity economy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity

tldr; it's not as bad as you think, but the transition is going to be bad (for some of us).

The planet has finite resources, least alone land. And then there is human psychology for hoarding resources.

> for some of us

I've read that before:

“Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of because no one was really poor – at least no one worth speaking of.”

Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, about the custom planet industry

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/437536-many-men-of-course-b...

It can only be "not as bad as you think" if the people currently at the top don't continue to hoard all the gains.

If the current system is maintained—the one where if you don't work, you don't earn money, and thus you can't pay for food, shelter, clothing, etc—then it doesn't matter how abundant our stuff is; most people won't have any access to it.

In order for society to reap the benefits of post-scarcity, we must destroy the idea that the people at the top of the corporate pyramid deserve astronomically more money than the people actually doing the work.

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