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by platinumrad 9 days ago
Nothing is infinitely valuable.
3 comments

10 engineers can make a billion dollar company. One Claude can replace 10 engineers.

This gets very close to "infinitely valuable", it starts to look like a vertical line to me

I don't think one Claude can replace ten engineers of the caliber it takes to build a billion dollar company.

I also don't think that every set of ten engineers of that level builds a billion dollar company every time.

There is also a limit to the number of billion dollar companies that can be built before being a "billion dollar company" no longer means much (see: Zimbabwe).

That assumes a world where nobody else has AI.

There's a night and day difference between:

1. One party has ASI and everybody else has nothing but their human brains.

2. One party has ASI and everybody else has high-level AI but not quite ASI.

Most science fiction assumes world 1, because it's a better narrative. However, we actually live in world 2.

> 10 engineers can make a billion dollar company

Not really. It's possible they could, but in practice they cannot. Creating a billion dollar company requires a good idea, good timing, and a lot of luck, the engineers are the least important part.

More than that it takes things like the right social connections, strong marketing, insight into customer demand, infrastructure spend, etc. You can't normally just convert engineering effort into profit in the way implied.
I don’t see anything in your argument that supports your thesis tbh, if anything, it supports the opposite
10 engineers build a billion dollar company and immediately realise they need 1000 people to run it. Getting 1000 Claude licenses will still be expensive, let alone maintaining those swarms of agents.
> 10 engineers can make a billion dollar company.

this wont be possible by the time its possible. there would be massive deflation. why would i care about 10 engineeers prompts when i can prompt it myself

One guy with a shovel can dig up a diamond!
Damn, now if only I could find 10 engineers!

A billion bucks, here I come!

There's literally no indication that this is the case, or will ever be. Unless you're a completely naive person who's impressed with all output of an LLM because you don't know what you're talking about. These models aren't impressive, and the people who think they are impressive are even less impressive.
The is a large middle ground between "aren't impressive" and "Claude can spit out billion dollar companies on demand".
A dog talking is impressive but you can't build a SaaS around it as if it's a genius.

The dog's words aren't the impressive part here

A market with only a single good makes that good infinitely valuable for exchange purposes. No trade can happen - everyone is just sitting on a big pile of the only thing that matters and they can only trade it for less of the only thing that matters.
Especially when you can actively choose to not use Anthropic. They think they have a moat from all of the IP they've stolen. Just wait until there's nothing more to steal and the laws eventually turn against them. And let's be honest about these companies. It is very much Dario and Sam and Sundar and Mark and Peter and Elon and... These are the choices they are making and hopefully they are held accountable both legally and within society as a whole.
> Especially when you can actively choose to not use Anthropic

I think what all western AI labs want is to take away that ability from you.

I don't think you understand the hypothetical being discussed
You're confusing 'didn't understand it' with 'didn't buy it.' Only one of those is a comprehension issue, and it's not mine.
No, you pretty obviously didn't understand it, at least in the sense of ASI being talked about. The whole "oh don't buy it" stops mattering. Humans are no longer the sole creators of information and intelligence. That is AI no longer has to steal, but humans will have to beg, borrow, or steal the information/products that ASI creates.
That's not going to happen.
Convincing argument, you win this one.
Good to be an optimist, I envy you
I didn't say "buy" anything. You've clearly bought into the narrative that ASI is even remotely possible with current architectures. You've chosen to ignore all of the lies that have thus far failed to come to fruition. The assumption is an insane leap from models in a loop that have no intelligence to models taking over the "sole creators of information and intelligence". Anthropic marketing is doing a phenomenal job for a large portion of those in the bubble.