Comment by lubujackson

This assumes the hand-wavvy "production" of knowledge workers translates directly and equally into money. Making a CEO 5% more productive might mean a billion dollars or it might mean nothing. Making a developer 5% more productive might mean the app gets finished faster or some more tickets are closed, but certainly direct monetary relationship between "work done" and "money made", especially if the knowledge work being optimized is, across the board, more of the busy work ("known-knowns") and not the "what should our new product line be" that tends to move the needle in spurts.

If you are a software contractor, yes more productivity turns directly into money. But it is the same for all other contractors, so there is no gain there either. This is really a structural transformation that crosses industry boundaries, not unlike when we all got on the internet. All I know from living through that is certain changes are obvious even if they take a decade (there will be more AI and more deeply integrated in our lives) but most of the secondary effects are unknowable.

If living through the dot com era taught me anything is that transformative tech routes around walled gardens (i.e. AOL/Prodigy) which is bad news for Anthropic/OpenAI. The wild west that comes after is a window of opportunity for founders but investors will overcommit early (like now) and undercommit when the dust is settled (post bubble).