alt Hacker NewsThe premise in the very first point seems off:
> the frontier labs are priced according to the narrative that they have produced or will in the very near future produce a fully automated drop-in replacement for most knowledge workers...
Even assuming this is how the AI companies are being valued (they're not), the numbers are off.
The "value" of most knowledge workers -- based on what enterprises currently pay for them -- is $50 - 70 trillion annually. It's reasonable to assume that if AI drop-in-replaced all those knowledge workers, AI companies could credibly charge somewhere in that order of magnitude, because that's what the market is already bearing.
So if their hypothetical revenues are double-digit trillions and valuations are some multiple of that, the entire AI industry would be valued at double-digit trillions at the least.
Yet cumulatively the industry (the frontier labs + the SWAG estimate of the AI parts of all the other players) are valued at, say, ~6 - 7 trillion? Which seems like a fair approximation of how much knowledge work they can currently automate.
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When thinking about these valuations, shouldn’t we try to quantify how much knowledge work becomes obsolete if other knowledge workers are automated? I.e. there are a huge amount of knowledge workers employed in businesses that create tools for other knowledge workers. AI won’t automate their work, those businesses will just cease to exist.
And then there’s the second order effect: if all the knowledge workers get automated, who is going to buy the stuff that’s produced?
You’re right; given that most of the money in the AI market is injected through OpenAI and Anthropic (which collect it through both selling equity and through customer revenue), the 7-8T is just a derivative of that.
> The "value" of most knowledge workers -- based on what enterprises currently pay for them -- is $50 - 70 trillion annually.
What do you mean? The sum of ALL US salaries is $13.4 Trillion per year. According to google $65T is the sum of ALL salaries Globally (not just knowledge workers). It's not reasonable to assume AI is a drop-in-replacement for any job yet (perhaps bottom tier customer support from oversees?).
> So if their hypothetical revenues are double-digit trillions and valuations are some multiple of that
So you're sort of premising here than more than 16% or 1/6 of all the world's jobs get replaced by AI. Hopefully you can understand that's both not the current AI capability and also would be a terrible (unprecedented?) economic shock.