[baron816]

Why is it a winner takes all situation? There’s really intense competition up and down the supply chain for AI. That competition is going to bring down costs for everything. It’s becoming cheaper and easier every day to start a company that will disrupt the established players and bring down prices. Everything will become commoditized.

The winners in the end will be consumers, and the losers will be the big AI companies.

[cousin_it]

I think you and the parent comment are both wrong. The right analogy is something like a new species, which consumes resources and makes more of itself. The species is "AI", or "AI-empowered organization with a handful of humans on top", whichever way you like to think of it. It doesn't have to be winner-take-all, there can be many such things running around. But the point is humans can't compete with such things and will lose resources to them. Something like Factorio, with the "players" building automated production chains everywhere, and the planet's native critters (us) not very important as workers or consumers, simply pushed out whenever we interfere.

[crabmusket]

A data centre the size of Gormenghast, with the remains of humanity clinging like limpets to the outer walls, trying to stay warm.

</doomer>

[carlob]

> trying to stay cool

FTFY

[bigbadfeline]

> It doesn't have to be winner-take-all,

Avoiding the winner-take-all trap requires a lot political efforts of the kind that's non-existent at the moment. Besides, winners and losers can be hand-picked these days, it's a simple process.

[baq]

The technical term is ‘mirror life’.

[rdedev]

> It’s becoming cheaper and easier every day to start a company that will disrupt the established players and bring down prices.

The underlying assumption here is that there is always something established players won't try to buy out new companies or use their existing capital to screw over others

> The winners in the end will be consumers, and the losers will be the big AI companies

Right now that is not the case. Look at the PC industry. I worry for the autonomy of a consumer in the future. It's probably going to be something like here is your rental thin client PC with agents on a monthly rental plan. What's that? you want to build a game with your own gpu? No no. A consumer grade gpu does not make sense in this day and age. Just ask the agent to build your game. We need the gpu compute for better things

[aabhay]

Machines are historically more obedient than people — so employing millions of AI agents to maintain your empire isn’t as fragile as enslaving millions of people. Historically its been the revolts of people, not the commoditization of resources that brought down empires

[paul7986]

Without humans and our content, AI is irrelevant! For it to stay relevant I think it needs to pay every human for the daily content we all create (daily conversations, photos, videos) and choose to publish to web daily. Cloudflare only lets bots into our websites upon AI bots from all industries pay to enter our sites.

Overall if we want to keep this society economy we are use to with AI in the picture ... we need to thrive off of AI .. not just AI thriving off our backs and destroying the society we know.

Wrote about my idea how to get us all paid from the content we create daily last week on my substack https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans...

Though we could all just go back to living off the land...

[bigbadfeline]

> Why is it a winner takes all situation?

Because there are a few winners who are happy to collectively monopolize the market - e.g RAM - nobody is increasing production, China is blocked from the market by sanctions and tariffs, the rest are more than happy to ask for a 1000% more than just a few years ago. Why would they do anything else - it's absolutely not in their interest for the prices to come down.

> There’s really intense competition up and down the supply chain for AI.

There isn't and won't be any "intense competition" - nobody can compete without hardware and it's now monopolized and affordable only to a token few.

> It’s becoming cheaper and easier every day to start a company that will disrupt the established players and bring down prices.

In the light of the current reality, this can only be classified as hallucinations. Actually, previously commoditized markets have become inaccessible and the trend is the exact opposite of what you're saying. It's bizarre to read naked assertions, which are not only without evidence but with all evidence pointing to the opposite.

> That competition is going to bring down costs for everything.

Back to reality, a new Teddy Roosevelt isn't going to magically reappear, not in either of the two parties. Imagine the world without him... we're almost there.

[ransom1538]

"Why is it a winner takes all situation?"

I have lawyer agent x10 better than yours in a civil matter. Guess who wins. What value is second best lawyer?

[nradov]

That's meaningless. First, there's no evidence that one legal agent would be 10x better than another. Second, winning a case requires more than just a good lawyer. At some point you have to actually have the facts and/or law on your side.

Some of you have never spent any time in a courtroom and it shows.

[solumunus]

It depends on the evidence available.