[manwe150]

But think about it this way: something simple like Slack charges $9/month/person and companies already pay that on many behalf. How hard would it be to imagine all those same companies (and lots more) would pay $30/month/employee for something something AI? Generating an extra $400 per year in value, per employee, isn't that much extra.

[steveBK123]

$35/iPhone user is not “per corporate white collar worker”.

Think outside the coastal high paid SWE bubble and realize vast swathes of people use 5 year old phones on a $25/phone family mobile plan.

Retirees, youth, blue collar, lots of people who don’t want/need AI or wouldn’t fork out $140 for their family of 4 to access it.

$35/head is a pretty high bar if you compare to per capita total streaming subscriptions across music and movies across all providers for example.

[csomar]

$35/head is possible but it has to provide tangible value to the user (beyond coding) which many pro-AI people will fail to recognize. People pay a lot for other stuff (ie: like their phone plan). Being digital or physical is not the issue here but the value perceived by the user.

[johnvanommen]

> Generating an extra $400 per year in value, per employee, isn't that much extra.

I agree, and would add that it’s contributing to inflation in hard assets.

Basically:

* it’s a safe bet that labor will have lower value in 2031 than it has today

* if you have a billion to spend, and you agree, you will be inclined to put your wealth into hard assets, because AI depends on them

In a really abstract way, the world is not responsible for feeding a new class of workers: robots.

And robots consume electricity, water, space, and generate heat.

Which is why those sectors are feeling the affects of supply and demand.

[whattheheckheck]

The world IS responsible for handling the people. Thats the whole fucking reason we made society to take care of children. Nothing is inevitable. It serves the interests of the few.

[YokoZar]

> * it’s a safe bet that labor will have lower value in 2031 than it has today

If AI makes workers more productive, labor will have higher value than it has today. Which specific workers are winning in that scenario may vary tremendously, of course, but I don't think anyone is seriously claiming AI will make everyone less productive.

[doodlebugging]

Most people in the economy do not use Slack. That tool may be most beneficial to those people who stand to lose jobs to AI displacement. Maybe after everyone is pink-slipped for an LLM or AI chatbot tool the total cost to the employer is reduced enough that they are willing to spend part of the money they saved eliminating warm bodies on AI tools and willing to pay a higher per employee price.

I think with a smaller employee pool though it is unlikely that it all evens out without the AI providers holding the users hostage for quarterly profits' sake.

[zozbot234]

That AI will have to be significantly preferable to the baseline of open models running on cheap third-party inference providers, or even on-prem. This is a bit of a challenge for the big proprietary firms.

[johnvanommen]

> the baseline of open models running on cheap third-party inference providers, or even on-prem. This is a bit of a challenge for the big proprietary firms.

It’s not a challenge at all.

To win, all you need is to starve your competitors of RAM.

RAM is the lifeblood of AI, without RAM, AI doesn’t work.

[SoftTalker]

They will pay it but lay off the number of employees needed to balance it out, and just expect the remaining ones to make up for it with their new AI subscriptions.