Comment by BoorishBears

> +20% speed for +20% spend isn't going to motivate a trillion dollars a year in spending.

I'm increasingly realizing this math is wrong, because LLM use is really sticky.

If Anthropic 100x'd prices tomorrow for their best model, so some companies offered 50% salary to keep 100% of your AI usage:

a) There are programmers who would take this deal. They've gotten to the point of doing what feels like even less than 50% of the work, developers were already pretty well paid, so they'll take it.

b) There are companies that'd offer this deal. Even if the only people who are taking this deal are not the best engineers, and the AI output is not the greatest, I think the last 6 or so years have seen a lot of companies realize capitalism is not as competitive as it seems.

They're not worried about putting out a worse product because... frankly, what else are you going to do? CF lay a bunch of people off, support gets awful: well you're probably not building a new Cloudflare in the next few years.

In the meantime the AI will get incrementally better, their market share will grow, and you won't be able to compete without taking the same faustian bargain.

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Maybe I was just naive but it's making me realize how much we take for granted in the world. Both the quality and relative value of things don't have to go up over time. Quality can go down while prices go up, and nothing will really stop it. Competition should stop it, but competition is really slow and can be interfered with. And as prices go up competition gets really hard.