Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

If the labor -> wealth pipeline is weakening, then the present won't behave like the past, i.e. you would need assets to success since you won't be able to work your way up.

In the last few months I seem to have gotten some kind of amnesia. Or woken up from a dream. Because now it seems like The Tech Industry has just been a rotten, festering wound of Ads, Surveillance, entertainment addition, and Privacy Invasion for over a decade. Like what have I liked reading about on this Venture Capital site? New tools, open source, ideologically motivated tech. Not three variations of a startup that is either harmful or useless, or a startup that is genuinely useful and then gets bought by Big Tech, absorbed into the Ad/Surveillance/Addition Tech Blob for the “talent” and then the product closed down. Or whatever.

But AI now, harruph. Definitely making it all much worse, and while gloating about it too.

> So the rich will buy and sell very nice things to each other while the rest of us get left out in the cold because we simply cannot compete with the robots. And because they will capture and control all resources (either by law or by force) we won't be able to create a functioning parallel economy either.

Here's another framing for you: at this point _there are no longer rich and poor people_. There are fewer people, but we knew that was going to happen as a consequence of declining birthrates. The elderly are taken care of despite an otherwise unsustainable dependency ratio, because robots can manage the actual business of survival. In that world everyone is a member of the nobility by the virtue of being _human_. There are a few holdouts - mostly religious nuts and other cults - but by and large everyone who is willing to accept the machine's gifts has their every material need catered to.

There is no world where legions of filthy rich AI barons lord it over the technologically illiterate peasants, though. How could there be, when literally anyone can plop down $20 and get access to a frontier model? When open weight models trail _at most_ a year behind the closed ones and compute continues to proliferate?

One of the few things we have figured out about AI is that productivity gains are mostly captured by the people using the tools, not the person paying for the model. In other words, using an LLM is a skill and there is still no substitute for the human driving it.

> How could there be, when literally anyone can plop down $20 and get access to a frontier model?

For now. And that too at a massively discounted rate to drive adoption.

> When open weight models trail _at most_ a year behind the closed ones and compute continues to proliferate?

Open-weight models require computing power to run. Consumer hardware prices are rising because of AI build-out, so much so that companies that used to serve ordinary consumer markets are switching to serve only datacenters. Megacompute does indeed continue to proliferate.

> One of the few things we have figured out about AI is that productivity gains are mostly captured by the people using the tools, not the person paying for the model. In other words, using an LLM is a skill and there is still no substitute for the human driving it.

Will this be the case in 20 years? Agentic workflows have come as far as they have in about two years of existence. Do you really need the problem between chair and keyboard will be needed after another 10? And do you really think that in 20 years time that we will all be paid to prompt increasingly advanced and independent LLMs?

> everyone who is willing to accept the machine's gifts has their every material need catered to

The way automation is going, knowledge work will be automated first before any physical production processes are. A lot of people will lose their livelihoods before goods in particular become "the machine's gifts". What do you think happens then? Will the capital owners who have captured this reduction in costs reduce prices proportionally? Or will they keep the gains for themselves? Do you think governments around the world will tax the upper class to the point of being able to give everyone their current livelihoods through government benefits?

You are pretty much just describing some sort of fantasy automated communism. Not to mention, in your world, gatekeeping the machines would instantly become the most profitable venture possible.

> Not to mention, in your world, gatekeeping the machines would instantly become the most profitable venture possible.

Yes, it would! That's why frontier labs don't open-source their models :)

The point is that the technology is already too democratized for anyone to hold onto it. Google had chatbot LLMs in 2019 and tried to keep them under wraps, how many years did that buy them?

> Do you really need the problem between chair and keyboard will be needed after another 10? And do you really think that in 20 years time that we will all be paid to prompt increasingly advanced and independent LLMs?

I think that things are going to get so much cheaper that we'll still be paid more than enough.

> The way automation is going, knowledge work will be automated first before any physical production processes are.

So far, LLMs are great and all, but they only really "fill in the blanks." That's a fundamental limitation of the entire concept of modelling in general; you cannot generalize to out-of-distribution inputs. The bottleneck is going to end up being human beings no matter which way you slice it. Because the bottleneck will be people, more and more of them will be hired, even though each individual is incredibly productive. This is also called Jevon's paradox, when making a resource less expensive leads to overall market growing.

> You are pretty much just describing some sort of fantasy automated communism.

If you went back a thousand years ago and told someone carrying a bucket full of water that one day pipes would run across the civilized world and water would literally be free basically everywhere, they might react the same way. If VLA-driven robots start reducing manufacturing prices, is it so unreasonable to slowly expect more and more things to go that direction?