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Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

geohot.github.io

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Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#41

Post by someguydave »

doodlebugging wrote: post #32
someguydave wrote: post #23

"But like people who are good with computers, the models want a terminal, not some candy ass iPad UI." Giving functionally illiterate people computers with GUIs should be regarded as a mistake.

At some point you were part of that group that you are labeling a mistake. At another point, your children are or will be if you have any. Locking all of these productivity tools in one generation is a recipe for failure. You should think outside the box that you are currently trapped in.

nope, I learned how to compute on the DOS command line

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#43

Post by conductr »

qoez wrote: post #5

I'm not sure I buy the "everyone will be AI coding to replace things that cost money with their own apps" idea. I only have so much limited time in my day (and only so many tokens on my claude account per week). It's probably going to make more sense for me to buy a tool that's been given human attention over the span of weeks over something i prompt into existence in a few hours (especially if I need 10 such tools t…

I can’t always see the personal appeal, however when I view through the lens of businesses that buy very expensive enterprise software and other SaaS products (maybe blending into consumer market), well I think they’re toast. I think the acceleration of AI tools recently isn’t going to be indicative of how long the full transformation will take, but a lot of companies will start preferring Build over Buy. I have no idea the scope, but this is already happening at some partial scale.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#44

Post by brookst »

ej88 wrote: post #17

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…

Exactly this. Also global sales and marketing and support.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#45

Post by jampekka »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #9

Let's not gloss over the electrical supply. These chips won't work for free.

LLM inference uses on the order of 1 Wh per query. That's under 10 meters of driving on an EV or running air conditioning for under 5 seconds.

https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/ai-footprint-august-202...

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#46

Post by CamperBob2 »

philipkglass wrote: post #22
singpolyma3 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 small models that I can run at home are becoming more capable, and I have replaced some API-based tasks with local inference as they improve, but large open weights models are still a lot stronger. The nice thing with larger open weights models is that competing providers serve them at modest margins and prices. I don't have the hardware to run the largest Qwen models, but I can get API access at low cost. Since…

And since there are only modest barriers to new commercial inference providers for these models...

Congress: "Hold my beer and watch this"

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#47

Post by theturtletalks »

> Over the past fifty years, the U.S. economy built a giant rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, brand familiarity substitutes for diligence, and most people are willing to accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value depended on those constraints persisting. – Citrini Research

Agentic commerce will render Amazon and the rest of the rent seeking marketplaces obsolete given enough time. Because LLMs can literally go straight to the seller and perform checkout, do market research to make sure the seller is legit, and the seller can sell for lower than on the marketplace since they aren’t paying a 15-20% cut.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#48

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

> 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.

I just think this analysis is wrong from the start. The "proper" pricing structure, the one tracking the actual costs involved, would be that you don't get to talk to a human being at all unless you pay for their time. Human frictions are what allow no-charge customer support to exist.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#49

Post by qoez »

conductr wrote: post #43
qoez wrote: post #5

I'm not sure I buy the "everyone will be AI coding to replace things that cost money with their own apps" idea. I only have so much limited time in my day (and only so many tokens on my claude account per week). It's probably going to make more sense for me to buy a tool that's been given human attention over the span of weeks over something i prompt into existence in a few hours (especially if I need 10 such tools t…

I can’t always see the personal appeal, however when I view through the lens of businesses that buy very expensive enterprise software and other SaaS products (maybe blending into consumer market), well I think they’re toast. I think the acceleration of AI tools recently isn’t going to be indicative of how long the full transformation will take, but a lot of companies will start preferring Build over Buy. I have no i…

I agree the free money in like one month coded SaaS apps are in big trouble. But like there's no way I'm gonna have the vision to desire to play a game I made myself using AI for instance (just the fact that I prompted it into existence ruins some of the exploration of a game made by someone else). So at the low end of the extreme (easy to make SaaS apps with basic code and a db) AI is a thread, but at the other end of the extreme (requiring vision and where human attention is a bottleneck) there's definitely still tons of opportunity.

Re: Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

#50

Post by antisthenes »

> Agentic commerce will render Amazon and the rest of the rent seeking marketplaces obsolete given enough time. Because LLMs can literally go straight to the seller and perform checkout, do market research to make sure the seller is legit, and the seller can sell for lower than on the marketplace since they aren’t paying a 15-20% cut.

Right.

You'll just end up paying the 15-20% cut to the people who train the model and keep it updated and run the agents that you rent from them.

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