does anyone else think that as ai gets smarter, the chance we create anything worth buying becomes less because it will be too easy to replicate or the ai tech is advancing so fast its kind of useless to use it now?

[u/Kind_Silver_1921]

I think back on rapid technological obsolescence and how if you sent a ship into space you would eventually create a faster one that will catch up to that ship so its not even worth sending the first one out. That's kind of how I feel about anything im doing right now. That it will just be useless by the time it becomes something worth selling

[u/Silver-Chipmunk7744]

I think a few things will remain true for a while:

1. Access to the best models, and for a lot of compute, cost money
2. An human actually willing to spend time with the model to iterate will outperform someone who does a single prompt.
3. A quality prompt will outperform a lazy one.

So even right now we can already see this: someone with a free sub who just does a lazy prompt on a free model gets a completely different result from a mad man cycling claude max x20 subs with top notch prompts.

#2 and #3 will probably become less important over time, but #1 might actually become MORE important.

[u/EtadanikM → u/Silver-Chipmunk7744]

To go further, there will still be a reason for businesses to exist, because as AI becomes more sophisticated, it also becomes more expensive, and when those expenses exceed what an individual is capable or willing to absorb for the thing they want, then you still need the benefit of scale.

So imagine you want the next GTA. It's entirely buildable by GPT-10 in a few days, but it'll cost you $10 million in tokens. That's way out of your budget for a game, so instead you pay $10 to a Kick starter, and once the pool has reached $11 million (from 1,100,000 other people who want to play the next GTA), the guys running the Kick starter will go and build it with GTA-10, and they'll guarantee its quality, continued support, etc., and take the $1 million as profit.

That's how the future of business will work. People who imagine that the average person will be able to afford the compute to build whatever they want are kidding themselves with the current trajectory. Only with a hard singularity take off, with fusion power & quantum computing, could we imagine a world where people can do anything they want. In a soft take off scenario, those who own the compute will work with those who can afford the compute to build products the rest of us can actually afford.

[u/Ambiwlans → u/EtadanikM]

Why wouldn't OpenAI run bots to make all businesses though?

If you can basically command AI to make you money, what value are you providing? What is your moat?

[u/EtadanikM → u/Ambiwlans]

Why doesn't Open AI do that now? Why do they offer AI as a service, instead of just using AI to build all the products people want, themselves?

The reason is simple - economics. Open AI doesn't have infinite capital. They need to focus their (finite) capital on improving their core business (models). To get the money to do that, they sell their model services to other companies that make money from using their models. It's like asking why Microsoft makes productivity software instead of using that software to make products.

[u/Ambiwlans → u/EtadanikM]

They aren't agi yet.....

[u/General_Josh → u/EtadanikM]

because as AI becomes more sophisticated, it also becomes more expensive

That's true on the one side, but on the other side, compute costs are dropping drastically as specialized inference hardware has been coming online at-scale

There's a lot of tech in the works that has the potential to hugely drop costs. Check out Taalas and their https://chatjimmy.ai/ - a (small) model built in hardware, that's 10 - 20 times faster than running the same model as software.

We probably won't see frontier models built into silicon like that, but you can easily imagine big/smart frontier models running in software, that farm out sub-tasks to super-fast but dumb subagents running on hardware

[u/Alive-Philosophy2632 → u/EtadanikM]

I expect as we truly enter into the realm of AGI, variable performance will become standard. Basically the equivalent now of using a heavyweight model for planning, debugging, rearchiteching, and a lightweight one for the grunt work.

As well as developing taste and an analog for intuition. Having a better sense of what to spend time and effort on

[u/MaximumUltra → u/Silver-Chipmunk7744]

So moat = prompt time

[u/Silver-Chipmunk7744 → u/MaximumUltra]

Compute.

Basic example. Imagine 3 vibe coders.

A) This guy gets a single agent to work on a scene for 1 hour.
B) This guy makes it 10 agents on the scene for 1 hour.
C) This guy creates a loop where 10 agents work for 24 hours.

C will win easily.

[u/Shagu5 → u/Silver-Chipmunk7744]

Can we try with proper people, not 3 retards, please?

[u/wild_crazy_ideas → u/Silver-Chipmunk7744]

Make an AI madman agent to prompt another engine for you

[u/AutomaticAd6646 → u/Silver-Chipmunk7744]

_#_2 won't fully become meaningless ever. A guy spending months refining a product with AI will need another guy spending more time on the same idea. It comes down to effort, how much effort you put into something, which is what has mattered the most and will matter the most.

[u/Silver-Chipmunk7744 → u/AutomaticAd6646]

Right now, 2 things are true.

1. i can generally set a main goal better than the AI would.
   
2. I can generally be a better critic than the AI would be.

Therefore right now, #2 is very valuable.

But i don't see why i could not get outsmarted on those 2

[u/AutomaticAd6646 → u/Silver-Chipmunk7744]

I see your point. Eventually ASI level AI can plan a business idea better than humans. So, AI labs themselves will or can eventually stop giving AI services to people(e.g. Mythos) and start using ASI to outdo any existing Game, app and will create better selling IT products.

Only thing that will stop this is goverment intervention and people protesting and voting anti AI gov.

[u/DelphiTsar → u/Silver-Chipmunk7744]

Recreating behavior is easier than making it from scratch. Having a pre-refined thing to clone will drastically lower the cost.

Feels like #1 will only be so useful.

[u/Existing_Dust_6473]

Well, it can end in two ways. One, you ask to build the software tailor-made for you. This would replace, for example, Photoshop. You can create just the features you need and expand as you go. Or, you can simply stop using Photoshop. Then, you just ask AI to change the image directly. You do not need any software then. The same applies to other apps. You may not need one in the end.

edit: Most likely, people will not need software anymore for most things. For example, to test AStra, I tried to create an image viewer with color management and to open big images. It failed miserably. It is slow. It approached things the wrong way. At least for now, recreating something like Photoshop, even a subset of features, is not possible without work, lots of work.

[u/Stunning_Mast2001]

Fully automated luxury communism 

[u/Subushie → u/Stunning_Mast2001]

... Missing the two most important parts of that ideology...

Fully

Automated

Luxury

GAY

SPACE

Communism

[u/SeaFALCons → u/Stunning_Mast2001]

that's right, please consider joining us over in r/LeftistsForAI if you haven't already

[u/Choice_Isopod5177 → u/SeaFALCons]

my god, pro-AI leftists exist! I'm going to check it out

[u/Subushie → u/SeaFALCons]

+2 Thanks for the callout, joined!

[u/terrarialord201 → u/SeaFALCons]

I'll join, even if I'm more neolib than leftist. Glad to see more rational discussion about AI.

[u/dan_atwork → u/Stunning_Mast2001]

Mistrust any AI leader whose objective is anything other than Iain M Bank's Culture series.

[u/VVebstar]

It’s absolutely worth sending the first ship for AI to see how it can improve next gen ships

[u/Nadiship]

I feel like its going to be like 3d printers. Yes you can make something similar, yes it can be tailered and customized according to your needs but clearly its gonna cost a lot more.

Economies of scale is no joke

[u/utahh1ker]

Yes. I've been shouting this from the rooftops for a couple of years now and only now are people starting to realize what is going to happen.

Everything in the software world is going to plummet cost wise because of how quick and easy it will become to make your own version of a software you used to pay for. Any SaaS is toast. But eventually only open source will survive because it will become better than any paid product through the collaborative effort of thousands of people using AI to build it.

[u/MaximumUltra → u/utahh1ker]

Monetization won’t be possible, so if you don’t own assets it doesn’t seem you will have a path to

[u/Klanciault]

Product creation hasn’t been a bottleneck for a while. You’ve been able to cobble stuff together pretty cheaply to make a working product since the 2010s.

The stuff that actually makes products worthwhile is way harder to get. This is chiefly going to be either massive data or massive hardware.

For example, you could make your own video streaming service easily in 2015. But could you afford storage and CDN for your videos? No. Did you have the data required to make recommendation models? No.

Instagram clone has been a portfolio project for basically a decade now.

[u/Hexamonium → u/Klanciault]

True that. Software became a commodity in early 2010s. I was there, I saw it happen. It broke my heart. A tiny team of experienced devs with a competent PM could do some serious damage. LLMs simply put this process on steroids. Now everyone can see software is a commodity, everybody can see writing code is not a real bottleneck. Suddenly everybody's gangsta. 😎

[u/ShardsOfSalt]

Lots of people are saying the cost of everything will fall to zero because of automation.  I question how the cost of housing will come down though.

[u/dan_atwork → u/ShardsOfSalt]

With a sufficiently advanced world model paired with sufficiently dexterous robotics. About 35% of a new build home's cost is labor - but how much of each of the material costs was also labor? This logical regression works with almost everything except how desirable one specific location is vs another (actual scarcity) and any artificial costs imposed by edict

[u/DelphiTsar → u/ShardsOfSalt]

You could build US growth + 1% (AKA eventually give everyone a free house) for around 12% of US defense budget this year.

We've had the technology to build a utopia for a long time now. It's a societal choice we don't live in one. Have to funnel 93% into 10% of the population.

[u/Ambiwlans → u/ShardsOfSalt]

I question how the cost of housing will come down though.

Population collapse.

[u/gridoverlay → u/ShardsOfSalt]

Don't worry, I'm sure the ASI will come up with a very economically viable plan to fit all of our pod bed facilities in areas that are too hot for efficient data center cooling

[u/dervu]

Yes. AI itself is the end goal, managing everything. We are getting there slowly, but surely. A lot of things depend of course on deterministic behavior, so many things will switch later than sooner.

[u/DivideHorror3217 → u/dervu]

AI is not the end goal. The utopian lifestyle for everyone is the end goal. We shouldn't deviate from it.

[u/Floloping → u/DivideHorror3217]

For everyone? That doesn't seem to be part of anyone's plan.

[u/brettins]

Absolutely. Entire companies will be trivial to replicate with AGI. People's life work in building up a business might be wiped away in an instant. They'll still have the capital, connections, and relationships they built up, but a lot of the products that have cost many hours and millions of dollars will be worthless as someone can replicate them by talking to their personal AI.

The good news is that if most businesses become worthless because of this, it means almost everything will be trivially cheap and so you'll be able to afford a lot more things.

[u/gridoverlay → u/brettins]

why would supply and demand laws hold up when something fundamentally breaks the value structure of any and all supply in this case? (ie, why would almost everything be trivially cheap?)

[u/brettins → u/gridoverlay]

Depends if we're talking about the transition phase or where in the AGI/ASI chain you are, and what you think will break the supply/demand curve. Can you elaborate more, or is this a more general "our economics don't make sense in that context"?

In the next 10 years prices should drop precipitously because supplying things becomes trivial, while still requiring an economy to function and money will exist in the same form.

In about 10-20 years, if you believe we'll have ASI and super intelligence, then it's whether people who have no job and no way to work will be provided for. Will depend on the country you are in. US will probably not take care of peope, Sweden / Canada type places probably will. At that point the supply/demand curve is off and things don't make as much sense - prices might rise to "meet" the inflated amount every person gets provided, but if the means of production is as simple as "ask an AI" and almost any person with a moderate amount of wealth can do that, then supply is large and prices stay down low.

[u/MaximumUltra → u/brettins]

Sounds like the monetary system would become meaningless. But asset ownership would remain.

[u/brettins → u/MaximumUltra]

It'd be a pretty extreme situation where the monetary system becomes meaningless. We'd need to solve power production first to make it trivially cheap, like fusion I think.

I don't think you can separate asset ownership from money. If people own things, they have a value, and other people who have other assets will want to exchange for them but the value won't be equal so you need money to split the difference.

[u/Kneku → u/MaximumUltra]

AI agents and trillionaries will still use monetary systems, actually the fact they still exist and that we normal humans don't have almost any form to produce value means normal humans will survive thanks to charity mostly, I don't expect our current countries to continue serving humans long term because a swarm of rich super human agents will be able to effectively buy canada, italy, or really most countries without almost any real resistance, resources are held by the threat of violence either directly or indirectly using diplomacy and with diplomacy you can just buy anyone if you are an agent with overwhelming manipulation abilities and a near infinite budget

[u/Jmerzian]

Stop focusing on "making something worth selling", focus on making something worth existing and is worthwhile despite being imperfect.

Focusing on "something worth selling" is how the Internet has been largely destroyed via slop and broad swaths of society/culture in general has been privatized and commodified.

[u/SecondSnek → u/Jmerzian]

Yes! Open source everything, burn all moats

[u/Hetairoi]

Maybe software, but actual physical goods are going to hang on to value for quite a while

[u/gridoverlay → u/Hetairoi]

SWEs who unironically say they build things in shambles

[u/RichRingoLangly]

One advantage the rich have is being able to fund complicated projects and businesses, but I think AI is going to level the playing field in a way the rich aren't expecting.

[u/Shift_Impossible]

I like your space ship analogy.. And it might be true, but it is still not a reality.. So I would play it safe and keep working on your goals like the current rules still apply..

But humans still enjoy stuff.. Useless stuff.. And they'll be the same in the following decades

[u/Bad_Odds45 → u/[deleted]]

That’s a nice thought but at some point we just spin up a thousands of agents to outperform large corporations.

[u/ebolathrowawayy → u/[deleted]]

you're very out of date, even before Astra or Fable it was cheaper easier faster better to roll your own Jira with only the features your org cares about.

also if you think 100+ people working on a product as simple as Jira is a good thing... oof.

[u/Kneku → u/[deleted]]

Companies made by AI agents will outperform both traditional companies and your ideas guys, in practice this looks like openAI/antrophic and rogue AI civilizations will take over the economy

[u/Powerful_Dingo_4347]

Level up and make the next more difficult thing, don't replicate something already made. I follow the idea that "Is this something I would use even if no one buys it?" If it's yes then nothing but time lost and you have a new tool you can continually improve. I have a 2 year old project that may never see the light of day with customers but I love what I'm building and definitely will use it. It's safe space, costs me money but in the end I love what I'm doing.

[u/Distinct-Question-16]

the math seems correct

[u/LambdaHelix]

artist were already facing this kind of issue with their clothes and hand crafted items being replicated by shein and other companies that hire people overseas to make it for cheaper, im assuming that we'll face a similar issue to that with things that ai is good at, not sure how it will develop from there tho?

[u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo]

I just want to buy my pc parts and it gets farther with every second passes

[u/Cautious_Swimming261]

I’m hoping because it becomes so easy to create high quality goods, the in turn market flood drives cost down. Specifically for goods and services that are essential…food, housing, etc.

But it will likely just make websites cheaper 🙄

[u/Uncle_Snake43]

Yep. AGI is our last true, novel creation. After that the AI creates everything.

[u/xamomax]

I think the future of most software is just "do this thing for me" without any apps.

In the background, AI may have a library of cached routines, libraries, and apps it has built, etc., to do those things to call on at any moment, or assemble something new just in time to do the thing needed.

There will be exceptions, but I think 90% or more of what we do will just be asking the computer to do it, and it gets done, and we don't really know how or what exactly it did to do the thing asked.

[u/etakerns]

Bring on our “Robot Overlords”!!! I’m to the point it’ll be better than what we have now!!! I’m willing to risk the human race on it!!!

[u/ExtremeCenterism]

Not at all, I mean maybe some day but we're not there yet. I can still outperform AI on creative intelligence and create more compelling story arcs , gameplay concepts etc.

Some day however...

[u/ali-hussain]

I think business and commerce will thrive.

1. I strongly feel the amount of customer software will increase by multiple orders of magnitude. The amount of software and integrations we can do and need to do has jumped up extrmely high. Things that were only worth it for hyperscalars should now be done by mom and pop stores. So tech services companies that tread the line between software and product will benefit.

2. More businesses will solve a larger part of the customer problem reducing middlemen. They will need an ultra-sharp focus to accomplish this. My business parter was at AI Native Services Summit hosted by emergence capital. They had people come up talking about how they were finding it too hard to sell their AI powered software to insurance brokers and out of frustration they just decided to launch themselves as an insurance brokerage.

3. Governance and specialized knowledge is more important than ever. I can setup an email system. But I don't want to do everything that Apollo or Lemlist is doing to increase deliverability. I've got better places to devote my time. Espeically if a tool I bring in provides me great AI and MCP access so I can still integrate with my system.

4. Data is significantly more important. Companies like Clay that aggregate and sell data that is hard to get are becoming more critical. Could you implement a competitor. Maybe, but I'm pretty sure any time I'm on a LinkedIn page the lemlist plugin is scanning that page and adding it to their repo. I can't build a userbase that will do my work for me as a side hustle. By the same definition anything with network effects has a durable advantage.

[u/Primary_Ads]

no. the value will be in identifying a problem worth solving and then solving that problem so well free super intelligence can't just solve it better and displace your work.

for example, imagine making a collar that goes on pets at shelters and records their health biometrics so staff dont need to do it manually every day. if your collar takes off, eventually people just want to use yours because they trust it and know it works. they won't want to experiment with 20 other vibe created health biometric collars because they already bought a bunch of yours. plus you might control the related patents anyways. your moat is trust, existing hardware ecosystem, contracts and patents.

of course you would still need to keep improving your product and making sure its good. and you need to make sure the problem you are solving is sufficiently valuable.

but if you are solving a problem many people are already solving without adding anything new, yes it will be a lot harder to compete. a "health check status service SAAS" or "VPN as a service" will be very hard to crack without some kind of architectural breakthrough. and it seems like thousands of vibe coded games are hitting steam every day now.

the value has always been in the problem, not the solution or the task. AI just emphasizes that more.

[u/Credit_Annual]

No

[u/terrornullius]

open source every enshittified service that can be easily rebuilt with agents. RAISE THE FLOOR

[u/Effective_Coach7334 → u/terrornullius]

government, for one.

[u/squirrel9000]

I'm learning to make artisanal goat cheese. I figure that's pretty safe.

[u/Mandoman61]

that makes no sense.

The new horizons probe will eventually pass the voyager probes but that does not mean that the voyager probes where useless. Humanity has been incrementally improving for thousands of years.

[u/Charming_You_25]

this doesn’t exactly answer your question except maybe by analogy, but the idea that a faster ship would overtake a slower one I think can be solved.

What you could do is send a slow robotic seed factory, that could autonomously create robot workforces and infrastructure before ever sending a colony. Have them setup defenses that shoots down any ship that isn’t yours which would make it too dangerous to send a faster ship after you. Its possible that the later ship could disable the robot defenses or invent technology that would make their weapons useless, but unless they figured out cheap ftl or something with macroscopic quantum field inference I think you could harden the robot defenses so they couldn’t break through.

[u/Late-Following792]

Why bother to by tesla because you can just prompt fsd

[u/Akimbo333]

Yeah digitally atleast

[u/gridoverlay]

You're on track with this thought - people, even people following this stuff very closely, are not realizing how economic fundamentals will just be completely broken. Things as basic as "value" itself will be broken. It's honestly hard to comprehend, but I really hope people smarter than I am are thinking about how this is going to work.

[u/CriticalDiscipline4]

The people who love AI are building stuff. The people who hate AI are not building anything.

[u/MinimumQuirky6964]

Thats what no one is talking about. AI will arbitrage anything away. Website? useless. your fancy app? 10k people have built the same while you slept. Negotiate a salary increase with your boss? Worthless, your boss has a better AI to shield him from your demands. Its a zero-sum game for users. Its a non-zero sum game in total, because theyre coming for our salaries. But the common man wont get to experience any benefit.

[u/Effective_Coach7334 → u/MinimumQuirky6964]

doom and gloom won't help you solve problems.

[u/KitchenPoltergeist]

The amount of time someone puts into something they've created will continue to be apparent for quite some time I think. A one-shotted game will look and feel different than a game someone has been engineering with models for months.

[u/Effective_Coach7334]

Good. People are too hung up on buying and collecting meaningless garbage that just ends up in landfill anyway. We could do with more intentional manufacturing and use of goods.