This is a classic HN mistaking the map for the territory. R&D and capex absolutely figure into de-facto profitability and sustainability for AI labs, despite their separate treatment in accounting.

> well most of us here on HN have benefited from decades of overinflated engineering salaries being paid by often companies that were not profitable and not only unprofitable

This is a really concerning perspective: people were paid what they were worth. Software is or was one of the few remaining arenas wherein a person can find a middle or upper middle class lifestyle consistently.

I will also note: a startup raising an 8 MM series A and eventually fizzling out is not the same at the hundreds of billions invested in these AI companies without a path to profitability. It is utterly absurd to pretend these are the same thing: any company ingesting that much cash needs to justify its capacity to survive.

> any company ingesting that much cash needs to justify its capacity to survive.

What, why? There are tons of low-margin capex-intensive business out there.

I think AI will end up like being like hosting. All the models will converge to being pretty-decent and the companies will have to compete on efficiency since they are selling a generic commodity.

You can already see Anthropic fears this scenario since they try so hard to make people use their first-party tools rather than plugging Claude in as a generic part of a third-party stack.

LLM hosting is the next VPS.

> Software is or was one of the few remaining arenas wherein a person can find a consistently.

I want to add something additional to this: it is one of the few fields that can afford middle or upper middle class lifestyle and is accessible.

I have no doubt if I could redo my life with the necessary resources I’d be more than capable of putting myself through med school and gone with a secure career that paid more than I ever made in software.

But at this stage of life? I don’t have the time or money to spend a decade+ paying some institution tens of thousands of dollars to hopefully maybe have a real career.

Once software as a career dies, I suspect many will find themselves locked out the middle class for generations.

> Software is or was one of the few remaining arenas wherein a person can find a consistently

Software salary inflation and expansion has made this the case. Tech’s accessibility to the educated has accelerated gentrification massively, rising up prices on rent and food. While the statement is correct, tech’s contribution to income inequality is part of the issue. If you’ve lived in Austin or Chicago (especially Austin) prior to ~2010 you’ll have seen this first hand.

> This is a really concerning perspective: people were paid what they were worth.

Even interpreting what-they-were-worth in the usual sense, I’m not so sure about this. We have seen wage collusion reported by the usual US West Coast-based companies. And some news on here[1] have reported that some engineer with a salary of $100K[2] might be producing $1M of value. And even factoring in the usual “but benefits and overhead” comes out to a solid factor of profit per programmer/engineer.

Despite that the sense I get (only from this site since that is my only reference) is that the so-called overpaid engineers are incredibly content to just have this happen to them. As long as they are paid well compared to other workers, it’s fine. No matter the profit factor. In fact, the discourse is very much focused on how “privileged” they were if the tide ever changes. Instead of realizing how much value they provided, collectively.

Outlets for capturing more of the value they create is entrepreneurship (Hello HN). Never any collective organizing. And entrepenurship is easily bought via aqcuisition.

Collective bargaining would have been relevant in case they ever get automated... by the very software they co-created.

One could imagine that this “privileged” collection of programmers could have served as a vanguard for the collective good of programming professionals as well as collective ownership of software goods, using their privilege to that end. The former never happened, and the latter is partly realized in people’s free time (see the OSS maintainer in Nebraska meme).[3]

[1] All from recollection since this is just news from the Frontier to me

[2] Of course the pay might be much higher now; this might have been a while ago

[3] when it isn’t simply exploited by corporations just using OSS without giving any back; a logical turn of events when no license or law forces them to contribute back

> This is a really concerning perspective: people were paid what they were worth.

The parent comment doesn't discount that, only pointing out that "what they were worth" was inflated due to a speculative environment. Wherein lies your concern?

Oh come on there are no “classic HN mistakes” here. Inference is profitable but bottom line is not yet. This is a very young industry and unlike those of the past, it’s much easier to picture a possibility of profitability. It’s absolutely different in that the marginal cost scales linear but solving for the R&D portion of a product where supply cannot keep up is a lot easier than some SaaS where the underlying product is not being used.

The salary jab was probably a little harsh.

Your ending is a bit of a fizzle too. There are many capex intense businesses that do just fine.