alt Hacker NewsLLMs upend a few centuries of labor theory.
The current market is predicated on the assumption that labor is atomic and has little bargaining power (minus unions). While capital has huge bargaining power and can effectively put whatever price it wants on labor (in markets where labor is plentiful, which is most of them).
What happens to a company used to extracting surplus value from labor when the labor is provided by another company which is not only bigger but unlike traditional labor can withhold its labor indefinitely (because labor is now just another for of capital and capital doesn't need to eat)?
Anyone not using in house models is signing up to find out.
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I am still trying to figure out the business model of open weights. Like... it's wonderful that there are open LLMs, super happy about it, good for everyone, but why are there these? What is the advantage to their companies to release them?
The labor theory of value hasn't been considered correct in nearly a century.
> Anyone not using in house models is signing up to find out.
What are they finding out exactly? That Claude Max for $200/mo is heavily subsidized and it will soon cost $10k/mo?
> What happens to a company used to extracting surplus value from labor when the labor is provided by another company which is not only bigger but unlike traditional labor can withhold its labor indefinitely (because labor is now just another for of capital and capital doesn't need to eat)?
This can be trivially answered by a thought experiment. Let's pick a market where labor is plentiful - fast food.
Now what happens to McDonald's where they rent perfect robots from NoosphrFoodBotsInc? NoosphrFoodBotsInc bots build the perfect burger everytime meeting McDonald's standards. It actually exceeds those standards for McDonald AddictedCustomerPlus tier customers.
As the sole owner of NoosphrFoodBotsInc (you need 0 human employees to run your company, all your employees are bots), what are your choices?
I was really confused by this comment, but I don't think it's just because of the Marxist analysis of the situation ('surplus value' of labor etc).
What's really confusing is the claim that there's already a huge labor surplus (so capital controls wages); wouldn't LLMs making labor less important be reinforcing the trend, not upending it?
Not saying I agree one way or the other, just want to get the argument straight.
think more broadly than 'labor theory'
finance today mostly valued on labor value following ideas of marx, hjalmar schact, keynes
in future money will be valued as energy derivative. expressed as tokens consumption, KWh, compute, whatever
you are right, company extracting surplus value from labor by leveraging compute is a bad model. we saw thi swith car and clothing factories .. turn out if you can get cheaper labor to leverage the compute (factory) you can start race to bottom and end up in the place with the most scaled and cheap labor. japan then korea then china
I am not a Marxian economic expert but this doesn’t make sense to me. Modulo skill atrophy, the big AI model provider can’t capture that surplus value because its customers can just go back to bidding for human labor instead.
LLMs don't upend anything about labor theory, good grief. Technologists really have no concept of history beyond their own lives do they?
Labor saving/efficiency devices have been introduced throughout capitalisms entire history multiple times and the results are always the same; they don't benefit workers and capitalists extract as much value as they can.
LLMs aren't any different.
Sounds like communist gobbledygook. This is not "destroying labor theory" any more than outsourcing did. Call me when we don't even need to prompt the shit ever again or validate results, and when the stuff runs unlimited without scarce resources as input.
This is our one chance to reach the fabled post-scarcity society. If we fail at this now, we'll end up in a totalitarian cyberpunk dystopia instead.