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Tell HN: A.I Has No Winners
3 points by dzonga 3 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments
Every revolutionary technology is built on extracting a resource very cheaply or the resource gets cheaper over time like rapidly cheap.

With British Industrialization we saw it with Coal giving us the Jevons Paradox

Likewise with Automobiles - Oil into petroleum products etc

Likewise with the internet - the more nodes that got added onto the network the cheaper it got to build more capacity - lay fiber lines, get more servers, build more personal PCs etc

A.I does not have the same properties - hell the reasonable people know this - hence they're tryna build A.I cheaply e.g Deepseek or use some hardware such as ASICS / FPGAs / TPUs whatever that can lower the cost of resource consumed -- i.e Electricity which unless we can build say something equivalent to the sun - costs are not gonna get any lower anytime soon.

Hence the noise of datacenter in space etc

So based on historical precedence - A.I will have no winners. I'm not saying it's not useful.



The resource being extracted is the application of knowledge to tasks.

Which might sound confusing or esoteric, but then again, white collar work exists strictly because there are abstractions over the economy that give that work leverage to run machines (companies) that then proceed to optimize this extraction and value creation process in other domains.

All this to say: the creation of digital <outputs> to be used and place in locations where they mean something to someone in the context of the abstractions built up inside corporations is the thing being extracted. How many of these units of output is the thing that changes and has a relation to Jevons paradox.


I can think of some quote Winners if you had OpenAI stock and they get to IPO...




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