Comment by estimator7292

The problem with viewing AI through the lens of capitalism is the fact that you can't make it artificially scarce.

AI is largely capable of running on-device. In a few years, it's likely that most tasks that most people want AI for will be possible from a tiny model living in their phone. Open source models are plentiful, functional, and only becoming moreso.

But you can't monetize that. We're currently dumping billions of dollars into datacenter moats that are just gonna evaporate inside the decade.

For the average user doing their daily "who was that actor in that movie" query, no, you absolutely cannot monetize AI because all of your local devices can run the model for free with enough quality that no one will know or care that there's a difference.

For enterprise scale building a trillion dollar datacenter and 15 nuclear reactors to replace a hundred developers... also no. LLMs are not capable of that, and likely won't be in the foreseeable future. It's also extremely unclear that one could ever get an ROI on in-house AI like this. It might be more plausible if it were a commodity technology you can just buy, but then you can't make a moat.

The only hypothetical fortune to be found is by whoever is selling AI to people who think they need to buy AI. Just like bitcoin or NFTs.

The good news is that this has two possible outcomes: capitalist AI vendors will want to remove AI from individual access so they can sell it to you: everyone gets less AI. Capitalists realize they can never monetize AI when it's free and open source, and give up: everyone gets less AI. Win-win-win, in my book.