[structural]

Uber's situation is exactly the same. OpenAI is offering inference for a bunch of industries at prices that make it more competitive than hiring humans to do the same work.

If the break-even price to actually provide the service wasn't actually economic compared to humans, would there be nearly as much of a market? That's the real question. OpenAI is basically betting that they can live long enough that AI systems get built around them, which creates enough of a lock-in that they still have customers when prices increase by a lot.

[wbl]

I think you underestimate the price by a few orders of magnitude where it makes sense to pay a model instead of a human. If someone earning 200,000 a year gets replaced by paying 500 a day to Anthropic or OpenAI their employer comes out ahead.

[structural]

There's likely always going to be value in limiting the number of $200k+ SWEs you have to pay. But that's not the interesting case.

What about the $10k/year offshored employees that are getting replaced by AI call centers? If that were the break even, then once you close down the whole building and develop the systems to not need them, then how much would inference costs have to go up before all that gets unwound and handed back to humans? It's more than you think - there's real margin there.