• akakevbot@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1 month

    I don’t feel like the companies are concerned about it costing more right now as much as they are betting that it will be cheaper in the long run. The cost of labor isn’t unlikely to decrease drastically while the technology is likely to become cheaper.

    While I would love to believe Microsoft is being burned by spending on AI, I think they don’t mind spending more now so long as they can trade the cost labor for the costs of technology and maintain similar productivity.

    Feels like they hope this will be to white collar jobs what Uber was for taxi drivers. Current profitability isn’t really the goal as much as being able to reproduce similar outputs.

    • lemonwood@lemmy.ml
      1 month

      Even if AI someday does become profitable short term, total profits will still go down long-term, because all profit comes from human labor (or exploiting nature). All any technology ever does in capitalism is to replace human labor, thereby putting more pressure on the empirically proven tendency of profits to fall. Profit gains from technology can only ever be short term and relative to competition who hasn’t yet adapted the technology. Once everyone has, prices drop, adjusting to lower socially necessary labor time.

      The only way for the billionaire class to keep profits flowing a bit longer at this point is to do what we already see them doing now: get rid of the free market by enforcing monopolies with captive markets, bonded labor and merging big capital with an increasingly violent and warring state apparatus: capitalism inevitably leads to fascism-imperialism every time.

      AI lends itself to this because of the centralized nature of data centers, the already monopoly based business model of tech companies and the political power and influence those monopolies hold. On the other hand, there is some potential, if not revolutionary at least disruptive potential, in small scale, specialized, open source models that can be trained with fewer resources.

      The only alternative road to fascism, of course, leads to communism.

      • makeshift0546@lemmy.today
        1 month

        Even if you take worst case costs Anthropic’s “Profitability” Swindle https://share.google/UV5HNgJyMzfcknekF it’s already approaching profitable.

        If you slow down the model update cycle it’s looking like at least anthropic can be profitable 🤷‍♂️. That argument is loosing it’s weight quickly.

  • makeshift0546@lemmy.today
    1 month

    Meh, right now, and only if you’re trying to replace the work force. At is current state, on a $30 a month Copilot plan you’ll already see a huge gain in efficiency with supervised coding and agents doing minor chores and maintenance.

    The average coder isn’t better then opus 4.6. No, is not ready to run production code bases unsupervised. Yes, it’s absolutely ready to do many many simple tasks autonomous and more complex coding with supervision.

    If you take even a week to try out this shit with an eye for what’s possible currently and have an ounce of common sense, I fail to see how folks don’t realize this will absolutely change how software is delivered. Yes humans will be involved but there will be much much less direct coding and a lot more supervision over multiple concurrent tasks that have had the time to delivery cut significantly.