There’s actually a strong case that agents will erode cloud providers’ margins because the lock in migration cost will be much lower in the future. No one ever migrated before because you’d spend $$$ to save $$ then the new vendor would gradually raise your rates negating the savings.
So then your argument would be that we could see a bifurcation in the SP493 where those who adopt AI see increasing margins and those who do not have their margins crushed. What's funny is that in that scenario, the aggregate market might look zero sum.
This assumes that AGI is not a winner takes all or winner takes most scenario. We just don't know that. If RSI actually happens, then it really could be winner takes all, and in that case being 6 months behind is the same as not even playing at all.
I’m surprised Claude worked on this… in the not too distant past my attempts to build human-CAPTCHAs triggered safety refusals. What model did you use?
Slate was far more compelling when we still had the federal EV incentive. Now... you can get a far better equipped Ford Maverick hybrid just around $30k (maybe less with dealer discounts). Hard to see what the market is for the Slate.
You can think that AI is a transformative technology and still come to the conclusion that the AI industry's economics don't pan out. I do think that we will eventually develop AGI. But I think the current scale up economics won't get us there before the music stops.
Well... Elon showed with Twitter that there's probably a large number of companies out there that have had negative ROI on employees too for a long time. Most companies would be hard pressed to show concrete value from each marginal employee.
This is all fine and dandy until a single line of code somewhere in the stack causes a production outage and management wants to know why it happened. Management won't accept you shrugging your shoulders and saying "the AI did it" for very long.
It's not an affordability crisis, it's a financial crisis. The models get cheaper super fast. By this time next year Fable 5 will cost less than Sonnet does today. That's not the problem. The problem is that many companies are going to realize that they don't get any ROI from AI. Generating code faster != more profit. Most of the Fortune 500 will likely realize this and then the token budgets will come crashing down. Most of their ideas are _bad_ ideas. Implementing bad ideas faster, won't lead to more profit.
Sure, you can use AI to potentially replace software engineers, but the F500 are also terrified of not having accountability or making mistakes. They won't be firing any engineers. In that scenario, there's just no room for AI usage. If you have to be responsible for all the code, then... AI has to either manage it completely autonomously (which even Fable can't) or... humans have to be in the loop which means they still have to understand the code. The best way to understand the code is to write the code yourself. So there's no productivity gain to be had.
I'm pro-AI, but I think we're due for a big crash next year.
How can you lock in when the harnesses are basically thin clients around the APIs and you can replicate them using agents in a short period of time? I haven't seen a compelling thesis yet for how you achieve vendor lock in for LLMs. Claude Code is a bit sticky, but if we're being honest its just because Codex doesn't have all the same features yet.
>The frontier labs have already lost the war for coding
This is a delusional take. Sorry, but anyone claiming this hasn't used Fable and compared it to the current best open source models. I see a lot of hype posting about GLM5.2. I see absolutely ZERO people using it in production compared to GPT 5.5 or Opus 4.8.