[gfarah]

From an economic standpoint, for these companies to see a return on their investment, won't they need to replace jobs? It will be challenging to recoup investments by charging regular users in a post-DeepSeek era. While I don't support job losses, aren't they the expected outcome?

[est31]

AIs replacing jobs is not the only way those companies can see a return on investment, it's not necessarily zero sum. If the additional productivity given by AI unlocks additional possibilities of endeavor, jobs might stay, just change.

Say idk, we add additional regulatory requirements for apps, so even though developers with an AI are more powerful (let's just assume this for a moment), they might still need to solve more tasks than before.

Kind of how oil prices influence whether it makes sense to extract it from some specific reservoir: if better technology makes it cheaper to extract oil, those reservoirs will be tapped at lower oil prices too, leading to more oil being extracted in total.

When it comes to the valuations of these AI companies, they certainly have valuations that are very high compared to their earnings. It doesn't necessarily mean though that replacement of jobs is priced in.

But yeah, once AI is capable enough to do all tasks humans do in employment, there will be no need to employ any humans at all for any task whatsoever. At that point, many bets are off how it will hit the economy. Modelling that is quite difficult.

[visarga]

> once AI is capable enough to do all tasks humans do in employment, there will be no need to employ any humans at all for any task whatsoever

AI has no skin, you can't shame it, fire it, jail it. In all critical tasks, where we take risk on life, health, money, investment or resources spent we need that accountability.

Humans, besides being consequence sinks, are also task originators and participate in task iteration by providing feedback and constraints. Those come from the context of information that is personal and cannot be owned by AI providers.

So, even though AI might do the work, humans spark it, maintain/guide it, and in the end receive the good or bad outcomes and pay the cost. There are as many unique contexts as people, contextual embeddedness cannot be owned by others.

[pixl97]

>But yeah, once AI is capable enough to do all tasks humans do in employment,

Also at this point the current ideas of competition go wonky.

In theory most companies in the same industry should homogenize at a maxima which leads to rapid consolidation. Lots of individual people think they'll be able to compete because they 'also have robots', but this seems unlikely to me except in the case of some boutique products. Those companies with the most data and the cheapest energy costs will win out.