Comment by csallen
4 hours ago
> What part of renting your ability to do your job is "democratizing"? The current state of AI is the literal opposite. Same for local models that require thousands of dollars of GPUs to run.
"Renting your ability to do your job"?
I think you're misunderstanding the definition of democratization. This has nothing to do with programmers. It has nothing to do with people's jobs. Democratizing is defined as "the process of making technology, information, or power accessible, available, or appealing to everyone, rather than just experts or elites."
In other words, democratizing is not about people who who have jobs as programmers. It's about the people who don't know how to code, who are not software engineers, who are suddenly gaining the ability to produce software.
Three years ago, you could not pay money to produce software yourself. You either had to learn and develop expertise yourself, or hire someone else. Today, any random person can sit down and build a custom to-do list app for herself, for free, almost instantly, with no experience.
> The improvement in AI models requires billions of dollars a year in hardware, infrastructure, end energy. Do you think that investors will continue to pour that level of investment into improving AI models for a payout that might only come ten to fifteen years down the road? Once the economic bubble pops, the models we have are the end of the road.
10-15 year payouts? Uhhh. Maybe you don't know any AI investors, but the payout is coming NOW. Many tens of thousands of already gotten insanely rich, three years ago, and two years ago, and last year, and this year. If you think investors won't be motivated, and there aren't people currently in line to throw their money into the ring, you're extremely uninformed about investor sentiment and returns lol.
You can predict that the music will stop. That's fair. But to say that investors are worried about long payout times is factually inaccurate. The money is coming in faster and harder than ever.
I have no idea what this flood of personal-use software is that you think normal people want to produce. Normal people don't even think about software doing a thing until they see an advertisement about software that does a thing. And then they'd rather pay 10 bucks for it than to invent a shittier version of it themselves for $500.
And I'm not being condescending about normal people. Developers often don't think about the possibility of making software that does a particular thing until they actually see software that does that thing. And they're going to also going to prefer to buy than vibe code unless the program is small and insignificant.
Go look at the numbers from Lovable and Replit and Claude Code and similar companies. Quite staggering.
I myself have run an online community for early-stage startup founders for over a decade. The number of ambitious people who would love to build something but don't know how to code and in the last year or two have started cranking out applications is tremendous. That number is far higher than the number of software engineers who existed before.
> Democratizing is defined as "the process of making technology, information, or power accessible, available, or appealing to everyone, rather than just experts or elites."
Your definition only supports my point. The transfer of skill from something you learn to something you pay to do is the exact and complete opposite of your stated definition. It turns the activity from something that requires you to learn it to one that only those that can afford to pay can do.
It is quite literally making this technology, information, and power available to only the elite.
> Uhhh. Maybe you don't know any AI investors, but the payout is coming NOW.
What payout? Zero AI companies are profitable. If you're invested in one of these companies you could be a billionaire on paper, but until it's liquid it's meaningless. There's plenty of investors who stand to make a lot of money if these big companies exit, but there's no guarantee that will happen.
The only people making money at the moment are either taking cash salaries from AI labs or speculating on Nvidia stock. Neither of which have much do with the tech itself and everything to do with the hype.
> It is quite literally making this technology, information, and power available to only the elite.
I don't know what to say to you. More people are coding now with AI than ever coded before. If your argument was true, then that would just mean that there are more elites than ever. Obviously that's not what's happening.
> What payout? Zero AI companies are profitable.
Because they're reinvesting profits into continued R&D, not because their current products are unprofitable. You're failing to understand basic high-growth business models.
> If you're invested in one of these companies you could be a billionaire on paper, but until it's liquid it's meaningless.
Plenty of AI companies have exited, and plenty of other AI companies offer tender offers where shareholders have been able to sell their shares to new investors. Again, it sounds like you just aren't really educated on what's happening. Plenty of people are millionaires in real life, not just on paper. You're massively incorrect about the payout landscape that investors are considering.
> The only people making money at the moment are either taking cash salaries from AI labs or speculating on Nvidia stock.
No, founders, early-stage investors, and employees with stock have cashed out in many cases. Again, it just feels like you're not aware of what's happening on the ground.
> Neither of which have much do with the tech itself and everything to do with the hype.
That's a very different argument. If you want to say that the investment is unsound, then fine, that's your opinion, but trying to say that investors have no appetite because they have to wait 10 to 15 years for a payout is incredibly incorrect.
> I don't know what to say to you. More people are coding now with AI than ever coded before. If your argument was true, then that would just mean that there are more elites than ever. Obviously that's not what's happening.
I don't know how I can explain this any more clearly.
If you need AI to create software, and the cost of AI is $200/month, then only people who can afford $200/month can create software.
Costs will increase. The current cost is substituted by investor funding. Sell at a loss to get people hooked on the product and then raise the price to make money, a "high-growth business model" as you say.
The cost to make a competitor to Anthropic or OpenAI is tens or hundreds of billions of dollars upfront. There will be few competitors and minimal market pressure to reduce prices, even if the unit costs of inference are low.
$200/month is already out of reach of the majority of the population. Increases from here means only a small percentage of the richest people can afford it.
I don't know what definition of "elite" you're using but, "technology limited so that only a small percentage of the population can afford it" is... an elite group.
This is fun and all, but I think we've reached the end of the productive discussion to be had and I don't have much more to say. Charitably, we're leaving in completely different realities. I just hope when the bubble pops the fall isn't too hard for you.