It also fundamentally makes no sense to do that, because the moat is just me breaking into their server and stealing their system prompt.
Why would I pay them money? For which scarce resource? Makes no sense. IP law but funhouse mirror.
And, trust me, the people building compute will feel the same. Because you being able to copy that stuff means business for them.
__
But that is all apart from the fact that having agent-only businesses is ethically impossible, because they have no shared humanity that grounds them and prevents them from acting against humanity in general.
This article is a work of fiction, interesting to read as entertainment, but definitely not a rigorous model.
The premise that just because a lot of investment goes into AI infrastructure means that it has to displace the entire workforce globally is wrong to begin with.
It even admits at the end that the scenario presented is unlikely: "I don’t want to dwell on whether AI can do what these companies claim. It may well be able to, though the current evidence suggests the gap between pitch and product is vast, and serious economists think the productivity gains are a fraction of what the industry projects."
It begs the question, what's the point in being alarmist and anxious about something that even you claim it's unlikely to happen?
I'd qualify your point that Anthropic and OpenAI can't raise prices, that is as of right now. Once the industry will go through a phase of consolidation and the bigger players will have some moat around their product, they'll have more pricing power.
Your last point is common sense in my opinion, I agree with it. At the end of the day most employees are (by definition) of average intelligence and most businesses are average in complexity. Thus, it is logical that average tools (AI models) should do the job for most people and most businesses.
Not OP, but it is a known fact that the cumulative profits of the airlines industry (in US) over it's history has been basically 0. We can say that essentially airlines are in business to support other businesses.
I believe this is what OP might've been referring to.
Great points.
- At the end of the day those are still private companies (albeit huge ones), so we can only speculate about the state of their private financial situation.
Once they will decide it's the right time to IPO, they'll publish all their financials and we'll start to have a clearer picture.
- Later, each company will slightly specialize and have a different go-to-market strategy, which will allow us to understand on a deeper level what works in the market and what doesn't (think about how Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are all huge universal social media platforms, but, each with a different target audience and different user base).
- Finally, the market will go through a consolidation phase in which winners will gobble up the losers and then the incumbents will have a real moat (against new-comers) and real pricing power on their user base.
Bankruptcies? The winners will gobble up the losers and the few remaining players will have pricing power.
Don't be naive thinking that OpenAI or Anthropic can possibly go bankrupt. There will always be someone happy to buy them up for a nice price.
Yes, the market will have to go through a consolidation phase though.
However, all businesses run on trust and human responsibility
Thus, it'll be hard for agent-only businesses to get a grip in the real world