Discussion
The Last Gasps of the Rent Seeking Class
johngossman: Like self-driving taxis where the business model is to stop paying drivers so we can pay more to big tech companies. Viva la revolution!
singpolyma3: In a free market it would be stop paying drivers so everyone can pay less for taxis.But the market is so unbelievably messed up that this is not what happens in practise.
qoez: I'm not sure I buy the "everyone will be coding to replace things that cost money with their own apps" idea. I only have so much limited time in my day (and only so many tokens on my claude account per week). It's probably going to make more sense for me to buy a tool that's been given human attention over the span of weeks over something i prompt into existence in a few hours (especially if I need 10 such tools to accomplish something).
OrangePilled: 1. This gentleman appears to write with an optimism that befits a sliver of society.2. Anthropic does not care about what models and hardware he is running under his desk.3. When you look behind the cupboard—Anthropic is "rent seeking" on a level well above consumers.4. I've got "AI safety" + "Capitalism" + "Military-industrial complex" bound together on my mental corkboard.
fn-mote: Disagree.The work on self-driving cars would not be done if there were not a way to profit from it. If it isn’t expected to earn more than it costs, it wouldn’t be done.Now maybe it’s all being done because of expectations of a monopoly (this is a free market consequence, right?), but …
ej88: Im starting to believe that the biggest moats will be in the application layer, and that people are starting to realize traditional saas moats apply to those companies toonetwork effects, distribution, proprietary data, systems of recordcompanies like opencode have none of the abovecursor's distribution has been faltering and they're hard pivoting to training their own models with their proprietary data to try to build their moat back
PaulHoule: "But like people who are good with computers, the models want a terminal, not some candy ass iPad UI."Back before the iPhone I used to get into arguments with HCI specialists that phones could be like butlers and should know with all the sensors that they have that you put it in your bag and behaved accordingly. I was told that was impossible then but it seems more possible now. Had the world gone at all that way we'd have a freakin' API to make a restaurant reservation and wouldn't have to go through multimodal hell.
sublinear: Where does this hypothetical API live? Within a walled garden? We almost have that already with delivery apps and some credit cards. They're awful precisely because they are rent seeking in the form of convenience fees.What you call multimodal hell is what others call meaningful choice and market competition.
piker: "The economics of opportunity cost are unchanged" a friend told me recently, and I think that's exactly what is driving your intuition here as well.
palmotea: > The best anyone can hope for is a free market, with everything properly priced. But for decades, the American market has not been free. It’s used purposefully added friction to exploit a time asymmetry between the business and you. And due to things like call centers, this has been very profitable for the businesses. Cable companies and insurance rely on the fact that your time is more valuable than theirs. They can hire people in India at scale to waste your time. They can use procedure and big data to design protocols to drive you just to the point of frustration at little cost to them. How often do you diligently check Uber and Lyft and select the cheaper one?> Enter AI, the great equalizer of time.I didn't read any futher: this article is dumb. If a company has the capability to hire literal people to waste your time, they can deploy more AI than you to waste the time of your AI.Or they just use price to limit access instead of time. Which means you're totally SOL if you have time but no money. Pay to win, that game everyone loves /s!AI doesn't flatten asymmetries, it exacerbates them.
mtlynch: > If a company has the capability to hire literal people to waste your time, they can deploy more AI than you to waste the time of your AI.I don't totally buy OP's argument, but I think you're dismissing it unfairly.His point is that in the pre-LLM world, if a company wants to waste your time, they can hire a call center employee overseas for US$4/hr and make you wait for an hour to talk to them for 30 minutes. If you value your time at $80/hr, then the 90-minute call cost you $120, but it only cost the company about $2, thus the asymmetry.OP's claim is that now, the asymmetry is gone. If both you and the company try to use AI, the company has less leverage to impose costs on you. They can deploy more AI to waste more of your time, but that means the asymmetry now is in the customer's favor because it costs the company more than the customer to get support.
skybrian: The safety improvements seem pretty substantial, though.
someguydave: "But like people who are good with computers, the models want a terminal, not some candy ass iPad UI."Giving functionally illiterate people computers with GUIs should be regarded as a mistake.
jitl: A society/country that produces functionally illiterate adults should be regarded as a mistake.
HoldOnAMinute: The rent seeking class is more powerful than ever. They have completely captured the world. They picked this peophile, who is going to use nuclear weapons, this weekend.
undeveloper: I'm not sure why you think a portion of the general voting base is "rent seeking", but it's the opinion of one without empathy. pick a better one that's at least not simultaneously stupid.Anyhow ...https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2024/10/28/ameri...> If Trump wins and Elon has influence, I do think there is a path to fix America longer term. While the general Trump/Elon vibes are good, I do have concerns about Trump’s fiscal record and protectionist tendencies. [...]> Of course if Kamala wins, I think I’ll be staying in Asia. Managed decline with a side of resentment and looting oligarchs isn’t for me.(he would get a hong kong citizenship anyhow)
throwway120385: It seems like the rent seeking class is just moving to selling you access to LLMs in data centers by the token. In the past, the "rent-seeking class" being described here was at least part of the middle class. Now a few billionaires are going to capture all of the value, but the rent-seeking isn't going away.
singpolyma3: Since the article is largely about open weights models, I think the argument is that this is the "last gasp" and soon doing inference at home will be common.
philipkglass: The small models that I can run at home are becoming more capable, and I have replaced some API-based tasks with local inference as they improved, but large open weights models are still a lot stronger. The nice thing with larger open weights models is that competing providers serve them at modest margins and prices. I don't have the hardware to run the largest Qwen models, but I can get API access at low cost. Since there are only modest barriers to new commercial inference providers for these models I'm not worried that API access to them will become drastically more expensive at some future time.
CamperBob2: And since there are only modest barriers to new commercial inference providers for these models...Congress: "Hold my beer and watch this"
1970-01-01: Let's not gloss over the electrical supply. These chips won't work for free.
jampekka: LLM inference uses on the order of 1 Wh per query. That's under 10 meters of driving on an EV or running air conditioning for under 5 seconds.https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/ai-footprint-august-202...
brookst: Exactly this. Also global sales and marketing and support.
conductr: I can’t always see the personal appeal, however when I view through the lens of businesses that buy very expensive enterprise software and other SaaS products (maybe blending into consumer market), well I think they’re toast. I think the acceleration of AI tools recently isn’t going to be indicative of how long the full transformation will take, but a lot of companies will start preferring Build over Buy. I have know idea the scope, but this is already happening at some partial scale.
doodlebugging: At some point you were part of that group that you are labeling a mistake. At another point, your children are or will be if you have any. Locking all of these productivity tools in one generation is a recipe for failure. You should think outside the box that you are currently trapped in.
someguydave: nope, I learned how to compute on the DOS command line
doodlebugging: Same here. It's been a while.
aerodexis: What's that adage about premature optimization?
antisthenes: > Agentic commerce will render Amazon and the rest of the rent seeking marketplaces obsolete given enough time. Because LLMs can literally go straight to the seller and perform checkout, do market research to make sure the seller is legit, and the seller can sell for lower than on the marketplace since they aren’t paying a 15-20% cut.Right.You'll just end up paying the 15-20% cut to the people who train the model and keep it updated and run the agents that you rent from them.
theturtletalks: > Over the past fifty years, the U.S. economy built a giant rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, brand familiarity substitutes for diligence, and most people are willing to accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value depended on those constraints persisting. – Citrini ResearchAgentic commerce will render Amazon and the rest of the rent seeking marketplaces obsolete given enough time. Because LLMs can literally go straight to the seller and perform checkout, do market research to make sure the seller is legit, and the seller can sell for lower than on the marketplace since they aren’t paying a 15-20% cut.
eloisant: How long until the AI provider takes a 15%-20% cut? "Affiliate fees"...
micromacrofoot: It's going to be the same asymmetry with different tooling. Why does he think people will be the only ones with these tools? Companies will utilize them, as they already are, and will also have more time to fine-tune, manage, and improve them.It's going to be your bots vs theirs. Theirs will have more resources. Net result? probably fewer jobs and wealthier companies yet again.
ReptileMan: To me it seems like the rent seeking is everywhere and getting strong in all facets of our lives. Tech companies, utilities, marketplaces, car companies, appliance companies - everyone is pushing subscriptions, gate keeping features and milking every possible dime.
_DeadFred_: Local veterinary, dentists, medical practices, funeral home, retirement homes, roofing, HVAC, etc are being bought by private equity and wealth extracted.When every financial transaction I make in part goes to a layer at the top that exists solely because they leveraged some digit in a balance book it is techno feudalism with an owning class being paid because they are the owning class, only instead of the baron always getting his cut it's invisible someones with even less accountability than the local feudal baron had.
anonymousiam: I wonder how many people noticed that geohot is George Hotz, who authored the article on his GitHub page.George Hotz runs Comma AI, a self driving car company.https://comma.ai
reedf1: funny. people are probably more likely to know him as geohot here. and afaik he is ex-comma. a more likely motivation (if you wanted to suppose one) is that he sells local compute. https://tinygrad.org/#tinybox
WJW: People used to call him "egohot" back in the day when he was cracking playstation games, because he was already incredibly arrogant even at a young age.
SpicyLemonZest: > The best anyone can hope for is a free market, with everything properly priced. But for decades, the American market has not been free. It’s used purposefully added friction to exploit a time asymmetry between the business and you. And due to things like call centers, this has been very profitable for the businesses.I just think this analysis is wrong from the start. The "proper" pricing structure, the one tracking the actual costs involved, would be that you don't get to talk to a human being at all unless you pay for their time. Human frictions are what allow no-charge customer support to exist.
efficax: you do pay for their time, when you (or someone else) buys the company's products. but customer support exists because it makes the company money, so really they should be paying you
SpicyLemonZest: Again, while this is a popular and widely desired price structure, it works only because the annoying customers who generate bad customer support tickets are constrained by human friction. If Bonzo who doesn't know what he's doing starts generating 10 pages a day of plausible LLM slop demanding a response, you can't tuck the cost of handling that behind the price of the product.
