> It isn't true now and it never will be for the top 1% of tasks, which will create the most economic gains

Vulcan Materials Company has produced some of the strongest and most resilient economic gains for investors at around 25% gross margins for 50 years.

Vulcan’s business is crushing rocks, and then driving those rocks to where people need crushed rocks.

I mention it because Vulcan isn’t a sophisticated business at its core, but its economic returns are exceptional, because they do their unsophisticated work exceptionally well, and exceptionally efficiently.

Across the economy, most economic gains are created by companies like Vulcan, who do boring repetitive work exceptionally well and efficiently.

I expect this to hold true into the era of AI. Most stuff probably doesn’t need an exceptional model, and paying for an exceptional model to do unsophisticated work will leave your business vulnerable to competitors who take time to find the most efficient model for the task, and undercut you.

I just wonder whether the analogy holds from atom based businesses to byte based businesses. At the end of the day, there are pretty hard constraints on how much a competitor could undercut Vulcan - they'd need to be better a) crushing rocks and b) driving those rocks to where people need it. Something about that, while simple, seems really nonfungible to do well. The business may traffic in commodities, but the service and quality it provides ironically seems to be not really a commodity.

Conversely, AI models feel pretty different. People will swap models at the drop of a hat and while not perhaps fully fungible, the cost of switching can be as low as one engineers it to be. In this case, the service does really seem to feel more like a commodity.

Not sure where this leads or how this ends. Perhaps those two will swap poles for me (IE as robotic automation improves, there are more commoditized Vulcans, and as metered intelligence improves, they become less fungible). I just can't quite see how yet. Just food for thought.