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Comment by lbrito | Hacker News Reader

This analogy hinges on the economic argument (that a robot costs 200x less than a human), but far from being an established fact, that notion is more or less entirely based on vague, misleading and exaggerated claims from the token peddlers.

The truth is no one knows how much the robot costs, and we probably won't know until its too late. Its extremely naive, though, to simply buy into the PR from the peddlers and redistribute their propaganda verbatim in the way you are doing. Although none of us know for sure, considering R&D, infrastructure capex and externalities, the robots are most definitively _not_ cheap.

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> Its extremely naive, though, to simply buy into the PR from the peddlers

OK, so don’t buy their PR, and try it yourself.

But if you do this, you will find there is a lot of evidence for the economic argument.

I tested out Google Argon 4 release by having it build a Web app to replace a binder I have for reconciling payments with reimbursable expenses.

It did it, as well as I would have and in much less time. I just set it to high and supervised it, it cost about $2. Even if you throw in a “supervision cost” to account for the time I had to spend interacting with it, it was substantially cheaper than had I done it at normal salary rates. Probably 2 orders of magnitude cheaper, even.

I think the OP was talking about robotics specifically and not tasks like the one you described. Nobody can argue that for tasks like your binder replacement cost savings are enormous.

It doesn't seem like they're talking about robotics, it does seem like they're talking about the AI data center build out and thus LLMs specifically.

No, they were carrying on the analogy about artisanal home builders being replaced by mythical robots that do it perfectly.

In this analogy, we human software devs are the artisanal homebuilders and the fancy LLMs are the robots.

And yes, there's quite a cost to build all the datacenters for all the AI that Big Tech believes that people will want. But as you mention, the cost savings are enormous for even despite that, and will make a much larger set of problems accessible to real software solutions, that previously either stayed on paper, in peoples' heads, or maybe an Excel sheet somewhere.

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