Is this substantiated right now in any real way? Is there any existing gap between the barista who doesn't care about AI and the person working at anthropic who has access to internal models? Or the person with 3 $200 subscriptions?

Maybe money? They can make websites for people? What gap really exists between these people besides earning potential, which already existed before AI.

The existing gap gets made worse by AI concentrating wealth even further to the owners of the assets that are producing via AI. AI will generate intense wealth from productivity gains, and those new gains will be more concentrated than any other economic round we've seen previously. It's a human labor eliminator the likes of which we have never run into before.

Fewer humans will be needed per dollar of output. Those gains will not go to labor, they will go to capital, the capital that owns the data centers, the factories, the stores, et al.

In the physical space (AI + robotics) it'll be a chaotic, slow'ish moving change, slower than the hypsters are predicting now, but it will happen regardless.

That barista job largely won't exist in the future. China will replace them with $3,000 bots with high-functioning AI software, and they definitely won't be powered by expensive Nvidia GPUs.

Slow changing service & manufacturing spaces will see a high wipe out ratio in terms of human labor being eliminated.

Walmart has 2.1 million employees, most are doing repetitive tasks that require modest levels of intelligence. If they could eliminate one million of those with AI + robotics, for a cost of less than ~$15,000 per year, they'd do it immediately. It's hard to imagine a future where that isn't going to happen. That human labor pool is costing Walmart probably $80-$100 billion per year. Amazon is even more forthright in their desperation to remove the humans from retail.