If you calculate the investment into AI and then divide by say 100k that's how many man-years need to replace with AI to be cost effective as labor automation the numbers aren't that promising given the current level of capability.
Don't even need to get too fancy with it. Open AI has publicly committed to ~$500B in spending over the next several years (nevermind even they don't expect to actually bring that much revenue in)
$500B/$100,000 is 5 million, or 167k 30-year careers.
The math is ludicrous, and the people saying it's fine are incomnprehensible to me.
Another comment on a similar post just said, no hyperbole, irony, or joke intended: "Just you switching away from Google is already justifying 1T infrastructure spend."
>Just the disruption we can already see in the software industry are easily of that magnitude.
WTF ? Where are you seeing that ?
Also no you can't calculate 100k over 30 years as 3M because you expect investment growth - lets say stock market average of 7 percent per year that investment must return like 24 million in 30 years otherwise its not worth it. That means 8 trillion in next 30 years if you look over that long of an investment period.
And who in the hell is going to capture 30 years of profit with model/compute investments made today.
The math only maths within short timeframes - hardware will get amortized in 5 years, model obsolete in even less. So best case scenario you have to displace 2 million people and capture their output to repay that. Not with future tech - with tech investments made today.
The global employment in software development and adjacent is in the tens of millions. To say the impact of AI code automation will be, at max, a rounding error of just 1-2% of that is just silly; currently, the junior pipeline is almost frozen in the global north, entire batches of graduates can't find jobs in tech.
Sure, the financial math over 30 years does not follow elementary arithmetic, and if the development hits a wall tomorrow they will have trouble recovering the investment just from code automation tools.
But this is a clearly nonsense scenario, the tech is rapidly expanding to other fields that have obvious potential to automate. This is not a pie-in the sky future technology yet to be invented, it's obvious productization of latent capability, similar to the early internet days. There might be some overshoots but the latent potential is all there, the AI investments are looking to be the first movers in that enormously lucrative space and take, what seem to me, reasonable financial risks in light of the rewards.
My claim is not that AGI will soon be available, but that applying existing frontier models on the entire economy, in the form of mature, yet to be developed products, will easily generate disruption that has a present value in the trillions.
You do understand that you don't replace a 100k developer and call it a day - you have to charge the same company 100k for your AI tools. No model is nowhere near close today - they are having trouble convincing enterprises to pay less than 100$ per employee. The current models do not math at all, the only way these investments work is if models get fundamentally better.
