alt Hacker NewsYou are making the assumption that the models are only used / paid for by 2.5% of the population (your knowledge workers value). There will be new value created by these models which people are happy to pay for which simply did not exist at all before. It is also naive to say that the hyperscalers are going to be expecting a return on this in 5 years, it will be entirely propped up by investments / IPOs as has been the case with any tech company for decades now to reach scale. The hyperscalers are currently spending ~650b combined annually, which they have the cash for and can sell in future compute instantly.
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> There will be new value created by these models which people are happy to pay for which simply did not exist at all before.
True, but I think the GP's point was that what consumers will pay won't be nearly as profitable as what enterprises will pay to increase the output of their developers and knowledge workers. ChatGPT is currently the overwhelming leader in consumer AI usage but only ~5% pay $20/mo.
As a recently retired serial tech founder, I'm now one of those consumers. I use AI webchat daily for general search, Q&A and even to write little automation scripts for myself, yet I haven't paid anyone anything for AI yet. Even after being heavily restricted and performance nerfed to hell in recent months, free webchat AI is still fine for everything I do, and I'm not remotely price sensitive.
Even as AI compute costs fall over time, I doubt serving ads against AI webchat to consumers will generate the kind of high-margin, sustainable growth VCs get excited about. It's so undifferentiated I bounce around between all four leading providers because there's virtually no moat locking casual consumers to any chatbot beyond a single question thread. I guess if it had a nearly infinite context window seamlessly integrated across all sessions, that might be somewhat sticky for some consumers but it could also get creepy for some others - and it would devour gobs of the scarcest resource in AI. Beyond Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, the mobile phone is the largest revenue, long-term mass consumer product ever but I just got a new flagship phone from a top-tier provider for $30/mo over 3 yrs. IMHO, even an all-you-can-eat, infinite context window, next-gen Mythos couldn't reach and sustain mobile phone levels of global consumer adoption at ~$20/mo. Unlike professional developers and knowledge workers, consumers don't have any "job to be done" big enough for an LLM to command that much of their zero-sum discretionary spend.
> There will be new value created by these models which people are happy to pay for which simply did not exist at all before
What sort of new value, and why will people pay for it from someone else rather than prompting for it themselves?
I'm sorry, what the feck does "value creation" mean here? I live in a place where people are so, insanely squeezed from every angle. Wages are stagnant, prices rocketing. Where is the money to pay for this value going to come from?
No one I know feels richer than they did a decade back. I've not been able to meaningfully put up my prices for a decade. People are tired and stressed and scared, particularly scared of a technology everyone keeps telling them will make them redundant.
There is no rising tide lifting all boats, just most of us drowning whilst a few whizz past in their yachts.
I honestly hope these guys faceplant ASAP. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people.