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Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

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Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#11

Post by vjvjvjvjghv »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #8
throwway120385 wrote: post #2

It seems like the rent seeking class is just moving to selling you access to LLMs in data centers by the token. In the past, the "rent-seeking class" being described here was at least part of the middle class. Now a few billionaires are going to capture all of the value, but the rent-seeking isn't going away.

Since the article is largely about open weights models, I think the argument is that this is the "last gasp" and soon doing inference at home will be common.

The trend over the last decades was towards more centralization and I don't see that changing. Unless we radically change our economic system, the rent seekers will always win. There will be probably less of them but they will be even bigger.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#12

Post by notfried »

This is a highly sensational take that is basically fan fiction. From "the era of purposefully frustrating humans is over", to "the added bonus of the collapse of the US economy. Frankly, it’s well deserved." and "everyone in the world is rooting for the Chinese models"; nothing of that is grounded in reality.

The Chinese models are open source because they are not state of the art. Once they catch-up or lead, they will likely close them down by a government mandate. Just like Meta was fine with Llama being open source but once they started to get close to OpenAI/Google/Anthropic, they shifted their language to "maybe we won't keep doing that."

The idea that AI will end the "rent-seeking class" that has effectively existed for thousands of years is... not going to happen! The business model just adjusts. And if AI is going to be an economy-shaping super disruptor, the cloud-hosted models will continue evolving beyond what you could ever run at home under the desk.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#14

Post by danans »

> The best anyone can hope for is a free market, with everything properly priced. But for decades, the American market has not been free. It’s used purposefully added friction to exploit a time asymmetry between the business and you.

A free market that is "properly priced" is a not a real state of existence.

Resource and information asymmetry, and the exploitation by the those with resource and information privilege of those without it has been present from the very beginning. A free market is just a tool (among many) to achieve a goal for a society.

For some, that goal is explicitly the concentration of wealth and welfare in very few hands. This is oligarchy.

For others, it's the advantaging the welfare and dignity of their "tribe" at the cost of welfare and dignity to perceived outsiders.

And for yet others, it is the advancement of universal welfare and dignity.

Neither a free market nor socialism gets you any of these. What gets you there are the shared narratives that utilize tools like free markets, regulation, and redistribution.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#15

Post by palmotea »

> The best anyone can hope for is a free market, with everything properly priced. But for decades, the American market has not been free. It’s used purposefully added friction to exploit a time asymmetry between the business and you. And due to things like call centers, this has been very profitable for the businesses. Cable companies and insurance rely on the fact that your time is more valuable than theirs. They can hire people in India at scale to waste your time. They can use procedure and big data to design protocols to drive you just to the point of frustration at little cost to them. How often do you diligently check Uber and Lyft and select the cheaper one?

> Enter AI, the great equalizer of time.

I didn't read any futher: this article is dumb. If a company has the capability to hire literal people to waste your time, they can deploy more AI than you to waste the time of your AI.

Or they just use price to limit access instead of time. Which means you're totally SOL if you have time but no money. Pay to win, that game everyone loves /s!

AI doesn't flatten asymmetries, it exacerbates them.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#16

Post by PaulHoule »

"But like people who are good with computers, the models want a terminal, not some candy ass iPad UI."

Back before the iPhone I used to get into arguments with HCI specialists that phones could be like butlers and should know with all the sensors that they have that you put it in your bag and behaved accordingly. I was told that was impossible then but it seems more possible now. Had the world gone at all that way we'd have a freakin' API to make a restaurant reservation and wouldn't have to go through multimodal hell.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#17

Post by ej88 »

Im starting to believe that the biggest moats will be in the application layer, and that people are starting to realize traditional saas moats apply to those companies too

network effects, distribution, proprietary data, systems of record

companies like opencode have none of the above

cursor's distribution has been faltering and they're hard pivoting to training their own models with their proprietary data to try to build their moat back

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#18

Post by fn-mote »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #7
johngossman wrote: post #4

Like self-driving taxis where the business model is to stop paying drivers so we can pay more to big tech companies. Viva la revolution!

In a free market it would be stop paying drivers so everyone can pay less for taxis. But the market is so unbelievably messed up that this is not what happens in practise.

Disagree.

The work on self-driving cars would not be done if there were not a way to profit from it. If it isn’t expected to earn more than it costs, it wouldn’t be done.

Now maybe it’s all being done because of expectations of a monopoly (this is a free market consequence, right?), but …

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#19

Post by OrangePilled »

1. This gentleman appears to write with an optimism that befits a sliver of society.

2. Anthropic does not care about what models and hardware he is running under his desk.

3. When you look behind the cupboard—Anthropic is "rent seeking" on a level well above consumers.

4. I've got "AI safety" + "Capitalism" + "Military-industrial complex" bound together on my mental corkboard.

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