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Comment by HDThoreaun

1 day ago

Source on 200 million knowledge workers worldwide? My understanding is that it's just above 1 billion. I dont think a billion subscriptions at $1000/yr is out of the question but it might take a decade to get roiling

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HDThoreaun

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swatcoder  1 day ago

You're suggesting that 1 in 8 people worldwide, including every one from infants and the elderly, are knowledge workers. Are you sure that's what you mean?

I'm not even sure that 1 in 8 people I know would qualify as a knowledge worker, let alone a knowledge worker that might profoundly benefit from on-the-horizon AI. And I'm in a highly skewed population.

  • WarmWash  1 day ago

    I think the underestimation is how many people want a personal knowledge worker in their pocket, and are willing to pay ~$65/mo for it.

    • swatcoder  1 day ago

      Personally, I've only encountered any of those people on line, and almost exclusively here on HN.

      Most people I've met -- and again, in a pretty darn skewed sample globally -- see $65/mo as a lot of money to spend on technology of any kind and can't think of anything much they need from "a personal knowledge worker in their pocket". I don't know a single person in real life who remains excited about AI at all, and only a few software engineers who feel it'd be worth that much.

      Everybody seems to be mostly confident with the "knowledge productivity" in their personal and professional life and a pretty skittish about spending in today's economy. Most would be excited about a magic new robot that affordably saved them from unwanted physical labor and drudgery, but nobody needs much real help making appointments or filling out forms or whatever.

      That's not to say I won't be proved wrong some day, with some further innovations in AI products, but global-scale demand isn't waiting for anything that's been released so far.

    • overgard  19 hours ago

      I've yet to meet a person that fits that description IRL. Admittedly I don't live in the valley but I do work in tech. The only place I see that demand is on hacker news (and I imagine twitter - I'm not on it).

    • gloryjulio  1 day ago

      The competitors of $65/mo subscriptions are the free models and services that are good enough. It will only get worse as open models or free tiers catch up. For most people, they just use whatever that's free

      2 replies →

  • HDThoreaun  1 day ago

    Well around 40% of people work. I dont think its crazy to say around a third of jobs are knowledge jobs, but what do I know

    • matthewowen  1 day ago

      85% of the world population lives outside of developed nations.

      27% of the world's workforce is in agriculture (contrast to the US where it is 1-2%). 15% in manufacturing.

      A lot of people work in "services" (especially in high income nations, where it's roughly three quarters) and some of those are knowledge workers... but a huge number of them are nail technicians or hairdressers or bartenders (etc etc).

hibgymnb  1 day ago

A billion subs at 1k a year????

I see a lot of out of touch takes here but this might take the cake

rootusrootus  1 day ago

A billion? Really? At 200M you’re already including a lot of people that stretch the definition of knowledge worker.

  • HDThoreaun  1 day ago

    > At 200M you’re already including a lot of people that stretch the definition of knowledge worker.

    How do you know this? Im certainly open to recalibrating my numbers which is why I asked for the source

  • naravara  1 day ago

    A lot of those ‘edge cases’ in the definition of “knowledge worker” are probably the stuff that’s most likely to have significant parts of the work augmented or replaced by AI agents. Like, call-centers are almost certainly going to get turned over in a big way. It’s not like the median tier-1 support operator just reading off a script is much better than an LLM anyway.