[vorpalhex]

Your entire premise is simply incorrect, through and through. Discard it entirely and begin again.

You have a hundred people, they have a GDP of N. Tomorrow, their productivity doubles because of a technological innovation. Your GDP is 2N.

Prices matter extensively to the rich and poor. The cost of a given compute capacity has gone from "literally the entire United States can't afford it" to "my lightbulb has this much compute because it's cheaper than choosing a dumber processor".

What happens tomorrow if eg ChatGPT 5.1 performance becomes doable for $500 of tech? $50? Swap this for grain harvesting, waste bin collection, etc if you don't like the LLM case.

[arexxbifs]

> What happens tomorrow if eg ChatGPT 5.1 performance becomes doable for $500 of tech? $50?

The bubble would burst and the US economy would face a recession?

[carsoon]

No, it wouldn't as the whole reason people were giving Openai that 500 dollars is because they thought they could make more than 500 dollars from it.

So now that value is just shifted into the companies that were going to purchase from openai.

It would just hurt the investors who have exposure to openai/anthropic/google/microsoft.

Much of the value of this AI boom is not from the direct model companies but its from companies which use their technology.

Although the government could be stupid and bail out these companies which WOULD hurt all us citizens and the inflation caused by money printing due to that could cause a recession.

[arexxbifs]

Here's what I think would happen if anyone, by tomorrow, could download GPT 5.1 for free and run it performantly on something like a $500 laptop:

* It would stop datacenter- and other related infrastructure construction, making huge investments effectively worthless for companies like Oracle and Amazon, and of course hurt the construction sector.

* It would hurt the companies you mention, plus a many more including NVidia, likely in ways that would lead to large-scale layoffs.

* It would seriously hurt corporate and VC investors and likely make them much less interested in large investments for quite some time, thus affecting other sectors as well.

* It would seriously hurt index funds and pension funds.

A number of years down the line, if LLMs are indeed capable of significantly boosting productivity, I'm sure we'd see a recovery, but when large bubbles suddenly burst there's usually some pretty serious fallout.

[SturgeonsLaw]

With hardware getting more performant and LLMs getting more efficient, what's preventing this outcome from being an inevitability?

Sure, the average person has no interest in self hosting, but businesses will at least run the numbers.

[thfuran]

There's no guarantee hardware will ever improve to such an extent that running your own ChatGPT 5 is cheap.