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lovich 4 hours ago

So what are all of these agentic based strategies going to do once the infinite money spigot of investment into AI ends and they need to start charging prices that actually make a profit?

I get that most of the cost is in training and not inference, but I don’t see how models stay useful once the worlds software updates in a few months post training since the models can’t learn without said training.

Are we just going to have shops do the equivalent of old COBOL shops where everything is built to one years standards and the main language/framework is mostly set in stone?

tedbradley 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Glad you asked. AI empowers people who couldn't do a job before to do a job. With more supply of qualified workers, these workers compete with each other by lowering the salary they'll take.

So:

* You get paid less. * The company might pay a similar amount due to LLM costs. Although, it could be more or less as well, depending on how it works out.

A couple of years ago, I saw a story of a guy writing two articles for a website a day. The boss asked him if he wanted to transition to AI-assisted writer for less pay. He said, "No." After a couple of weeks, he got canned. He checked the website out, and it had a bunch of AI writing on it.

LLMs are there to reduce your salaries and increase the businessowner's profits. Bigger inequality in wealth, it's only going to grow more and more. Also, a ton of people fired across many different fields.

ehnto an hour ago | parent [-]

That is one possibility (that is playing out). Another one worth contrasting is the idea of AI as leverage for the worker. If you can take a regular developer and augment their output by 25%, then they have become more valuable to you and you should pay them more. Why should you pay them more? Because the market rate will price in that they provide more value now and you'll lose those workers to competitors if you don't.

That's a pretty old economic idea, and it will be interesting to see if it holds up in this instance. I have no idea how this all plays out. I do think it won't be one size fits all though.