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Comment by throwyawayyyy | Hacker News Reader

Because the profits from any company which _could_ trivially be redone by an OpenAI agent will crash to nothing, because it could trivially be done by someone else's agent too. It's what ultimately makes the economics of OpenAI, Anthropic et al so crazy: they need to capture trillions of dollars in value, but those trillions of dollars won't exist any more. What's the value of writing a piece of marketing copy now, the same as it was last year? That, across the whole economy.

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George Hotz wrote a similar perspective

>I think this is basically what it will be for most knowledge work, knowledge workers are so grossly overpaid compared to the energy they consume, and AI will rectify that. This explains why the Chinese are giving the (much more moderate resources to train) models away for free. They love to see deflationary economics in the US.

https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/06/11/ai-wi...

Wait a sec...

"knowledge workers are so grossly overpaid compared to the energy they consume, and AI will rectify that"

Then what's left to work on that pay well? machines already do things that depend on mechanical work faster...

Is this the end-all argument that AI is really a mean to pay the least possible to people?

a.k.a. the ultimate transfer of wealth and power to uber rich people?

I just notice that "knowledge workers are so grossly overpaid compared to the energy they consume, and AI will rectify that" implies that you should not be paid more than what you need to eat.

Well that's what money is. Things are worth how much time humans spend on achieving it, i.e. how much you needed to pay for food to exist for that time + all the time/food you paid for to be consumed by other people recursively.

Not at all, things are worth what the market (= all humans in aggregate) are willing to pay for them. The cost associated with producing something does not matter, except for setting a lower bound.

Yeah and in a free market, neither side can influence the price, hence is settles at the variable costs, which at minimum is what you need to exist, i.e. what I already described.

The petite bourgeois is nothing but labour in the eyes of the capital class.

>explains why the Chinese

I think it's less that they want to encourage deflationary economics - because I think this has a tremendous chance of backfiring given that is not how massive productivity/efficiency gains have turned out in the past.

I think they genuinely want to prevent the rise of yet ANOTHER Western bigtech monolith in Anthropic and/or OpenAI. They want to make sure they have no moat. That keeps the value out of the nascent bigtech and instead in people who can run the models.

That, and also I think it just makes them look good and positions them closer to being the respected leader of more of the world.

Look at how they reduced oil imports when the US was being destructive and stupid. China was just like "we're strong, we'll reduce oil consumption to help the world, and if y'all ever want solar panels, we make 'em--also, here's some free AI!"

Chinese models also wrote code with 23% more vulnerabilities if told they're writing for the DoD than for the Chinese equivalent.

It is very hard to start reasoning what could have happened in those models but I am pretty sure that it was not intentional sabotage.

No kidding? What’s the state of the art for lists of these kinds of prompt biased performance? Or should I ask Opus to game it out with Muse and <Tencent>

https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/blog/crowdstrike-researche...

Got it, I’m curious about other biases and prompt context results. First that come to mind are Gemini’s very different responses depending on gender in the question. If it exists, there are others?

Wait, what? "Overpaid compared to the energy they consume"? Firstly, is he talking about the energy resources humans require to be alive? We consume humongous amounts of resources, especially compared to LLMs. It's not clear what that has to do with anything.

Secondly, this is not how Economics works. Relevant terms here would be "supply and demand" because that's what determines almost all wages. Knowledge workers (or any workers) are not paid based on how much it costs to sustain them, like some function of the COGS bill. Knowledge workers are paid so much higher because they supplied the one thing that was pretty rare but for which the demand was very high: intelligence.

AI is not "rectifying" that by consuming less energy, but by providing a supply of intelligence that scales with energy and compute, both of which are technically easier to scale than humans. Which is another piece he misses, the monopoly is not on AI, but on compute. (See: all the kerfuffle about export restrictions on Nvidia chips.)

He is right about some other things in that article though.

Hotz is the computer nerd version of Richard Feynman. Big fan.

Uhh just read that blog post and am not seeing what you see my friend lol. Feynman was one of the best scientific communicators and, simultaneously, scientific contributors of the 20th century. We have plenty of people who are great scientific communicators, and plenty who are great contributors, but not quite any these days who achieve his notoriety as both.

Michael Nielsen is up there among my favorites as well.

I agree with this perspective. There will be lots of local distortion but the “competition” for anything AI has commoditized will drive profits down. So, who will be able to afford the AI?

Add to that the fact that the AI itself is going to be more or less a commodity as well and you wonder where all the profits are meant to come from.

LLM makes may make more money before their tech really works than after.

I think you’re right and I think the leaders of the AI labs know they’re never going to have profits. Money will become meaningless before then. But they need money now to actually make the future where money is meaningless. So I think they’re deceiving everyone to get capital. I don’t think that’s a bad thing though so I haven’t been trying to push this message.

In at 9: Hacker news discovers marginal revolution.

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