> I can't use last year's SOTA model when my competitors can use the current SOTA model.

Lots of people can. Tools don't need to be top of the line to be useful. Snap-on may exist, but they don't put Harbor Freight out of business.

Advanced IDEs exist but complex projects were still built in vim.

The more capable the budget models get, the lower the marginal gains from using the frontier models, even if the frontier models always stay 6 months ahead.

> I can't use last year's SOTA model when my competitors can use the current SOTA model.

You can use open source models of equivalent or better capabilities for ~90% less cost...

If you kick and scream hard enough, you can always find a data point to make sure you're correct.

No one is saying that the Opus model last year costs 90% less now than it does this year.

That's not how it works.

There are better, more efficient models with equivalent capabilities that are 90% cheaper (see DeepSeek v4 Pro).

I'm using the current ELO of the models, and both are still running in the arena.

DeepSeek models are open-source so there are a bunch of third-party providers offering similar prices. Factoring in that DeepSeek have to train the model (whereas third parties can make a small profit over just the inference costs) I'd assume that on net they're spending investor money, but I wouldn't think that's any less true of OpenAI.

It's only in retrospect that you know the level of filtering required to find this S curve trend among the noisy perturbations.

Just like people trying to time the market with "technical analysis". It is extremely easy to find whatever pattern you are looking for. A lot harder to accurately distinguish predictive power from fantasy.

> Huh? What luxuries? Us plebes can't fly business class? We can't buy that expensive handbag?

Yes. Why do you need to ask this? This is the K-shaped economy. Demand is dropping (especially in luxury handbags) as the middle class gets hollowed out. Maybe you're well-off enough that you can still pretend neoclassical economics is still holding up. Must be nice.

> they can't afford to buy a family home in a lot of markets but this has to do with generational wealth and a housing shortage in many parts of the USA.

Yes it has to do with generational wealth, that's my point. A shortage is true in some cases, but not all. That's mostly fueled from massive demand from the wealthy. Buying the family home is the most obvious asset that is becoming out of reach. This past year, many other assets have gone the same way. I think that will continue.

> nobody buys the mountain of goods the robots and AI are producing

I don't get why you're appealing to modern economic theory when the whole point of this scenario is that the standard economic relationship entirely breaks down. You can dismiss it as sci-fi, but people are thinking about this scenario. The wealthy no longer need a mass consumer market in this scenario to stay wealthy. They could simply trade proprietary algorithms, real estate, raw resources, and automated services exclusively among themselves. The global economy shrinks down to a private, self-contained club. Everyone else is locked out of the market. This should sound familiar if you're paying attention to the current markets. There would only need to be a few to maintain the status quo, and they remain inside the market in exchange.

The exit from this bleak future is societal unrest, which needs to occur sooner rather than later in order to succeed. That's the source of instability. Later on, not so much.

> Even during the industrial revolution, jobs moved from the farm to the factories.

Yes, but living standards seriously deteriorated for a long time. That's not too far from the exterminism in the above scenario, just not as dire since factories still need far more human labor to run them. If the labor itself becomes redundant, that's very bad.

I'm not saying this will happen. But dismissing it as sci-fi doesn't seem wise when we're seeing the signs of that future already.