[intuitionist]

ChatGPT isn’t literally or figuratively cutting off anybody’s limbs though. It’s more like, the guy on the assembly line had a mech suit, and now he doesn’t have a mech suit, and he’s sad. Skill atrophy is a real concern but unless you assume that nobody is working to maintain those skills it doesn’t change my analysis much.

[tapoxi]

And soon we expect everyone to have a mech suit, and only a handful of companies can make one, and they rent it to you and can revoke it at any time.

And what happens when they've saturated the market? Prices go up to the maximum the market can bear, and then they'll extend into other markets. Why rent the model to build a profitable company with when you could just take all that profit for yourself?

[subhobroto]

> Why rent the model to build a profitable company with when you could just take all that profit for yourself?

You're describing a standoff at best and a horrible parasitic relationship at worst.

In the worst case, the supplier starves the customer of any profit motive and the customer just stops and the supplier then has no business to run.

This has happened a few times in the past and is by 2026, well understood as a way to bankruptcy.

That has always been the beauty of free markets - it's self healing and calibrating. You don't need a big powerful overseer to ensure things are right.

Competing with customers is a way to lose business fast.

For example:

- AWS has everything they need to shit out products left, right and center. AWS can beat most of their partners and even customers who are wiring together all their various products tomorrow if they wanted. They don't because killing an entire vertical isn't of any benefit to them yet. Eventually they will when AWS is no longer growing and cannot build or scale any product no matter how hard they think or try. Competing with their customers is their very last option.

- OpenAI/Anthropic/Google isn't going to start competing against the large software body shops. Even if all that every employee at TCS does is hit Claude up, Anthropic isn't going to be the next TCS - it's competing with their customers.

[dinfinity]

> That has always been the beauty of free markets - it's self healing and calibrating. You don't need a big powerful overseer to ensure things are right.

If by "self healing and calibrating" you mean 'evolve to a monopoly and strongarm everybody to do exactly what you want whilst removing all pressure on the quality of your product', then yes, that is the "beauty" of free markets.

That is the stable state of free markets. Antitrust regulation and enforcement only barely manages to eke out oligopolies and even then they are often rife with collusion and enshittification.

[subhobroto]

> evolve to a monopoly and strongarm everybody to do exactly what you want whilst removing all pressure on the quality of your product

This certainly isn't true of small businesses and the local mom-and-pop shops in your area.

For free markets to work, small businesses need the ability to thrive and starting one should be exceptionally easy.

What has unfortunately happened in a lot of developed countries, is that in order to regulate the very large companies you're upset about, governments have made it nearly impossible to start small businesses to act as competition. That makes it even easier for companies to consolidate and evolve into a monopoly, strong-arming everyone - the exact opposite effect of what those regulations were hoping to fix.

Are there small businesses in your area like the 1 or 5 person HVAC or cleaning or landscaping or breakfast company that you disdain as much as you disdain UnitedHealthCare?

[dinfinity]

Always the same nonsense. Simple question: do you think in a fully free market, without any governement intervention, those mom and pop shops would not be bought up or merge?

The truth is that consolidation is an attractor. If it hasn't happened yet in a market, it will. Economies of scale give an undisputed advantage. If there is anything I'm upset about, it is about deluding people by vilifying the only thing that prevents feudalism (and massive abuse of humanity for profit) from happening.

[subhobroto]

You and I are debating: do free markets naturally inevitably trend toward permanent monopolies, or does free-market competition constantly disrupt incumbents?

The reason why Silicon Valley is the hotbed of such innovations, large booming businesses is regulators haven't yet got their hands into software.

In comparison, more regulated industries like BioTech, Education, Finance, Oil, Gas, Infrastructure is a joke.

The Biden administration had started the ball rolling on shackling up AI and LLMs: regulating, enforcing, mandating bottlenecks. It would have been kneecapping ourselves - essentially placing on ourselves the very sanctions we now place on China! The U.S. wouldn't need China to invade Taiwan to bring down our economy, we would willingly do it to ourselves! The push to regulate AI through mandatory reporting thresholds and compliance bottlenecks for large compute runs is the exact type of barrier-to-entry that kneecaps open-source disruption and entrenches the current giants. Hopefully these illinformed suicidal tendencies are on pause, for now.

I CANNOT for the life of me, understand why we would think, placing any limit on our creativity and productivity is a smart decision but I digress.

> do you think in a fully free market, without any governement intervention, those mom and pop shops would not be bought up or merge?

Is there a regulation right now that stops BigHVAC from acquiring your local, community 1 to 5 person HVAC company?

We don't have to engage in hypotheticals. I already asked you "Are there small businesses in your area like the 1 or 5 person HVAC or cleaning or landscaping or breakfast company that you disdain as much as you disdain UnitedHealthCare?" and I don't have a response yet.

> The truth is that consolidation is an attractor. If it hasn't happened yet in a market, it will. Economies of scale give an undisputed advantage

Mathematically, probabilistically, a software engineer will make way more risk adjusted money working as an employee at the MAG7 than starting their own startup, yet, every month, we have software engineers joining and creating startups.

A similar mindset makes your HVAC tech start their own or continue to run their own even though mathematically, probabilistically, economies of scale would give them an undisputed advantage - but that, consolidation isn't free. An even remotely skilled operator understands that and what that entails.

The moment a big, consolidated HVAC company raises prices or provides terrible service, a smart technician can buy a van, print some flyers, and steal their customers. Free markets allow the mom-and-pop shop to constantly respawn. Infact, Gavin Newsom has managed to distort the HVAC market in California by making it really onerous to operate refrigerants that does make it pretty hard for mom-and-pop shop to constantly respawn. This is why you will notice a lot of PE picking off HVAC companies in California!

By your logic, the world would have stopped at Sears, Blockbuster, and IBM. Yet, the first two aren't even a thing in 2026 and I don't want to comment on the IBM of 2026.

There are even more examples than these that obliterates the tired "consolidation is an inevitable endpoint" argument. A reasonable person would immediately acknowledge that size does not guarantee survival in a market where innovation is permitted and the entry fee is low.

The "feudalism" that you apparently abhor is actually caused by government intervention. When governments heavily regulate industries (like education, healthcare, finance, infrastructure), they make compliance so expensive that only massive, consolidated corporations can afford the lawyers and lobbyists to survive. Regulation protects the consolidated giants from the mom-and-pop startups!

I must deal with reality though - your sentences suggest companies always consolidate and the only way is to counter that with regulation. You really believe in this and this does hold true in heavily regulated industries but then you need to ask why does the same not hold true for industries with low barriers to entry and permissionless innovation?

Here's a thought experiment: Before the AI boom, the MAG7 rivaled the GDP of entire nations and dominated global market caps. They certainly don't need AI and LLMs to stay happy - infact Google, who invented transformers, is now rivaled by OpenAI and a swarm of startups founded by the very engineers who left Big Tech to disrupt it. This isn't the only time this has happened in tech!

So why are they now rushing to outcompete each other, over multi billions of dollars, to the extent they are self-sacrificing staff to freeup capital to invest into compute?

[noosphr]

>It’s more like, the guy on the assembly line had a mech suit, and now he doesn’t have a mech suit

You just answered your own question there.

One woman was doing what would take a dozen. Now she can't.

[hackable_sand]

I think it's more like:

The dude was incompetent, was able to launder their incompetence through a humunculus, and now is afraid of being caught.

[kridsdale1]

Oh hey it’s me.

[nemomarx]

Are people working to keep their skills up, much? Spending a day a week coding manually or etc?