What I think is happening is that the scale of thing you can hope to build at a below-corporate scale should radically grow. Corporate environments should suffer for this, being that inefficient.

> YCombinator was founded on that premise - small teams of founders and early employees could be orders of magnitudes more productive than the 1000s of corporate employees at their competitors.

I think this is still true, but the theory is:

1. You don't need YC-type funding to do YC-type business any more; 2. You don't need to scale the business past those small teams any more, you just buy more tokens.

For clarity YC still obviously has a place as an incubator, mentoring, and networking function. I just think that what was previously the inevitable conclusion that you have to hire all the people the second you hit PMF to keep up with scaling the business as you scale sales is no longer inevitable. If you didn't want to go that way before AI, you were a "lifestyle business" and not worth investing in. As more and more knowledge functions get capably implemented by AI, it's the preferred position: humans are vastly more expensive than tokens, so you want them doing the stuff the AI still can't do.

I don't think this necessarily translates to mass unemployment. I think it translates to masses of smaller businesses that are radically more efficient because the handoffs between business functions are tool calls, not emails to someone who doesn't want to help.

> The Internet was revolutionary because it let millions of people bring products to market without asking permission.

Think about it this way: if I am a small business owner but I think it makes sense to do something that previously only a team in a corporate environment could do but is now within the reach of AI, not only can I do it now, but I also don't have to ask anyone for permission! Who wins between the corporation and the small business in that scenario?

> AI doesn't really have that property - if anything, it makes things more centralized, with more gatekeepers, and so seems more likely to destroy economic value than add to it.

I think this will turn out to be backwards. I can see a version of this where the number of things you can do without needing to turn to a gatekeeper for help increases to the extent that the balance completely inverts.

The vast majority of businesses are small, and AI can give them tools which previously required corporate scale to make sense, without the inefficient hand-offs between busy, political humans. Which is also something that the internet did! Getting an advert in front of a national market pre-internet was Hard but sometimes you had to do it because your target market was "all Canadians who buy toothpaste" or whatever and that meant saturation-bombing the physical environment with physical billboard ads, posters, flyers, and so on. So you only did it if you were P&G-scale. Now you, personally, can do it, trivially, for better or worse.

I dunno if the employees were ever really needed for scale. WhatsApp famously had 300M users and 13 employees at the time of acquisition; Instagram was something like 50M users and 55 employees. If you know what you're doing software scales basically infinitely, and the employees are there to make the software just slightly more tailored to specific user populations (and because upward career mobility for managers involves having more headcount). Yeah, building a revenue model takes people, but Valve employs only about 400 people and makes billions, as do various quant hedge funds like DE Shaw or RenTech.