🤖 AI collapses the cost of knowledge work to ten cents on the dollar

Jason tech w=1.05 · n=56 · E126 (2023-04-28) · explicit_prediction · strength 3 ▶ 31:18 SUPPORT

“I don't think it's 10% less Chamath or that, you know, I think it's like 90%, 10 cents on the dollar to do knowledge work.”

Chamath tech w=0.90 · n=83 · E126 (2023-04-28) · explicit_prediction · strength 2 ▶ 23:21 SUPPORT

“So I just don't see a world where, on the one hand, physical labor will continue to be more expensive, they'll demand more and more money to do the job that they're asked to do, and the knowledge work will become increasingly more deflationary because so much of it will be automated by AI that those folks will charge less and less.”

Sacks tech w=0.77 · n=53 · E126 (2023-04-28) · sentiment · strength 2 ▶ 28:33 OPPOSE

“I think a different way to put it would be every knowledge worker can get 30% more work done.”

Friedberg tech w=1.08 · n=65 · E126 (2023-04-28) · sentiment · strength 2 ▶ 34:57 BRUSH_OFF

“So the Luddite argument of, oh, this is going to destroy jobs and destroy the economy and drop costs by 90 percent, lawyers are going to get cheaper, etc. etc. I think that doesn't even matter. It's the tip of the iceberg.”

Chamath tech w=0.90 · n=83 · E132 (2023-06-10) · explicit_prediction · strength 2 ▶ 1:20:27 SUPPORT · horizon 60mo

“So it's like all this stuff is going to happen where like all these classes of jobs are going to go away.”

Jason tech w=1.05 · n=56 · E132 (2023-06-10) · explicit_prediction · strength 3 ▶ 1:23:01 SUPPORT · horizon 36mo

“I'm assuming it's indefinite because the amount of work it takes to write a job requisition is more work in some cases than actually automating with AI or Ready, the job function, and so I think 20-person companies might double in size in the next two or three years, but still have 20 people.”

Sacks tech w=0.77 · n=53 · E132 (2023-06-10) · sentiment · strength 2 ▶ 1:24:39 OPPOSE

“So one is, I think there's a lot of AI fear porn out there right now. And I just think that like all these doomer scenarios are, they're not going to play out overnight.”

Jason tech w=1.05 · n=56 · E133 (2023-06-16) · sentiment · strength 2 ▶ 33:22 SUPPORT

“I would say four out of five startups that we've invested in and the majority of them that we're being pitched on right now are not only talking about AI, which they were all talking about it three years ago, they're actually implementing it now because the tool sets are available.”

Jason tech w=1.05 · n=56 · E135 (2023-07-01) · positioning · strength 2 ▶ 56:58 SUPPORT

“I'm looking at businesses as an investor, what I'm looking at right now is businesses that were previously not economically viable before this technology, and then that are now economically viable”

Chamath tech w=0.90 · n=83 · E137 (2023-07-14) · sentiment · strength 2 ▶ 1:03:03 SUPPORT

“It replaces all board meetings.”

Jason tech w=1.05 · n=56 · E137 (2023-07-14) · sentiment · strength 2 ▶ 1:03:13 SUPPORT

“It will reconfigure a website in real time to increase sales. It will tell you why sales are falling off a cliff.”

Jason tech w=1.05 · n=56 · E146 (2023-09-22) · explicit_prediction · strength 2 ▶ 1:05:07 SUPPORT

“I asked him about hiring and the size of the company said, I'm not hiring anybody in the next year or two because all my developers are 30 or 40% better ... I got senior developers who are turning into 10x developers. We're not hiring. We're just going to have increased margin.”

Chamath tech w=0.90 · n=83 · E152 (2023-11-03) · sentiment · strength 3 ▶ 1:21:55 OPPOSE

“We have nothing to really show for it yet, so it's hard to say that. It's cute and it's cool, but there's nothing really substantive.”

Friedberg tech w=1.08 · n=65 · E152 (2023-11-03) · explicit_prediction · strength 2 ▶ 1:23:37 OPPOSE

“One is a new modality in human-computer interaction through chat, which is incredible and opens up lots of new software applications and markets, which I think can be transformative and worth trillions of dollars.”

Chamath tech w=0.90 · n=83 · E158 (2023-12-23) · explicit_prediction · strength 2 ▶ 1:06:01 SUPPORT

“the economic impact of AI is so massively deflationary. It may be an order or two orders of magnitude more deflationary than AWS was ... That's all I'm saying is the effective break-even goes way down in a world where AI proliferates. I think that's positive for founders.”

Sacks tech w=0.77 · n=53 · E158 (2023-12-23) · sentiment · strength 2 ▶ 1:08:11 OPPOSE

“I just think your typical SaaS start right now is spending the money on more prosaic things.”

Jason tech w=1.05 · n=56 · E158 (2023-12-23) · positioning · strength 2 ▶ 1:01:39 SUPPORT

“they are not expecting to raise like some giant seed or Series A. They're raising just the amount of money they need. ... And they're keeping their expenses absurdly low. The biggest trend I'm seeing is outsourcing of talent.”

Friedberg tech w=1.08 · n=65 · E159 (2023-12-29) · explicit_prediction · strength 3 ▶ 1:00:49 SUPPORT

“Single person efforts can yield what historically has required 6, 12 or more people to do using co-pilot tools in AI. ... just imagine once the majority of people are using these co-piloting tools to write software and start to learn how to use these tools, it's really gonna increase productivity globally as it finds its way into every business”

Chamath tech w=0.90 · n=83 · E166 (2024-02-16) · explicit_prediction · strength 3 ▶ 34:56 SUPPORT

“if you look at the amount of OPEX inside of any company that sits inside of R&D, if you look at the amount of stock-based compensation, right, if you replace humans with bots, which is what this is, you're going to crush those things. SBC at the limit goes to zero”

Jason tech w=1.05 · n=56 · E166 (2024-02-16) · explicit_prediction · strength 2 ▶ 59:12 SUPPORT

“we're going to automate the rest of the jobs with AI and we're going to outsource and have hourly workers or full-time contractors outside the United States. It's the undeniable trend.”

Jason tech w=1.05 · n=56 · E168 (2024-03-01) · explicit_prediction · strength 3 ▶ 1:03:51 SUPPORT

“is it going to improve 10% a year or 10% a month? If it's improving 10% a month, we're going to get to 98% of queries done this year. If it's doing 10% a year, okay, we're going to get to 99 or 98% of queries in four years. In other words, this is happening, folks, and it's happening at a blistering pace.”

Friedberg tech w=1.08 · n=65 · E168 (2024-03-01) · explicit_prediction · strength 2 ▶ 55:02 SUPPORT

“I think it's inevitable that human knowledge labor, where the job of the human is simply the ingestion of data and then communicate an output of data, seems like it will eventually be replaced by computing somehow. And this is happening now in an accelerated way with these LLMs.”

Sacks tech w=0.77 · n=53 · E168 (2024-03-01) · explicit_prediction · strength 2 ▶ 57:06 SUPPORT

“Well, it sounds like they're able to eliminate a lot of front line customer support roles by using AI, which is what I would expect. ... And I think the AI will do a really good job eliminating level one. It'll start to eating to level two, but you're probably going to need humans to deal with the more complex cases.”

Chamath tech w=0.90 · n=83 · E168 (2024-03-01) · explicit_prediction · strength 2 ▶ 1:06:17 SUPPORT

“A one-person company should be able to spend less than a few hundred grand to get to product market fit in the next few years.”

Friedberg tech w=1.08 · n=65 · E169 (2024-03-08) · explicit_prediction · strength 2 ▶ 39:20 SUPPORT

“That one individual starts to have an entire cohort of knowledge workers available at their disposal to do things that we can't even imagine today.”

Chamath tech w=0.90 · n=83 · E170 (2024-03-15) · explicit_prediction · strength 2 ▶ 37:52 SUPPORT

“In this phase, the op-ex of companies will probably be cut in half. ... I think you find that there will be millions of companies with one person and then a whole layer of software and conductors and agents and bots. That's the future.”

Jason tech w=1.05 · n=56 · E170 (2024-03-15) · explicit_prediction · strength 2 ▶ 36:10 SUPPORT · horizon 12mo

“Where this is going to be next year is there's going to be a conductor. There's going to be somebody who has a role or a piece of software has a role where you say, hey, you're a CEO of a company, you're a founder, a product manager.”

Friedberg tech w=1.08 · n=65 · E170 (2024-03-15) · explicit_prediction · strength 2 ▶ 37:15 OPPOSE

“So I think what it creates is extraordinary leverage for people and organizations, which is why generally economic productivity goes up. People don't lose jobs, they level up.”

Sacks tech w=0.77 · n=53 · E170 (2024-03-15) · explicit_prediction · strength 2 ▶ 32:28 OPPOSE

“And I don't know if it ever gets to 100% where you don't need coders anymore, but it's going to make coders much more productive over time. You're going to get this huge multiplier effect on the ability to write code and that's really exciting for a bunch of obvious reasons.”

Friedberg tech w=1.08 · n=65 · E171 (2024-03-22) · explicit_prediction · strength 2 ▶ 34:05 SUPPORT

“so much of the service and discovery, reading through documents, understanding what they mean and what they say can be automated through AI and LLMs”

Chamath tech w=0.90 · n=83 · E173 (2024-04-05) · explicit_prediction · strength 3 ▶ 50:32 OPPOSE

“I'd like to summarize my thoughts in three charts. And I call this, This Time It's Not Different. ... as productivity goes up, which is what AI should give us, just as we've seen in the past, compensation also goes up, which means new job classes will be created.”

Friedberg tech w=1.08 · n=65 · E173 (2024-04-05) · explicit_prediction · strength 3 ▶ 53:24 OPPOSE

“Or does the cost of making an architectural drawing drop by 90%? And it enables us to do more detailed, higher resolution architectural drawings across more places, more frequently, and the industry actually booms. ... we will see these tools creating more leverage for knowledge work instead of just simply replacing knowledge work and that humans will start to shift to a higher order of work”

Sacks tech w=0.77 · n=53 · E173 (2024-04-05) · explicit_prediction · strength 2 ▶ 59:24 OPPOSE

“Now, look, in the short to medium term, AI leads to productivity gains. In the long term, it may lead to job losses. But as you guys pointed out, hopefully by then we'll have lots of other jobs created by the productivity boom that we're going to get.”