OpenAI · Anthropic · Google · owenmcgrann.com
The dead economy theory
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The AI subscription that was supposed to be an investment in efficiency turns out to be a contribution to the destruction of its own market.
Key facts
- The US horse population grew from nine million in 1840 to twenty-one million by 1900, seemingly immune to technological change
- As an OpenAI evaluation lead told the New York Times, 1 models now achieve “over an 80 percent win rate compared to human professionals” on tasks that, months earlier, no model could match
- David Autor at MIT has shown that roughly sixty percent of today’s jobs didn’t exist in 1940
- OpenAI alone has been valued at north of $800 billion
Summary
You’re probably familiar with the dead internet theory: most of what you encounter online is now generated by bots, for bots, with humans reduced to a shrinking audience for machine-generated noise. It’s utterly desiccating to log onto spaces seeking a live mind to joust and think with, and find a relentless stream of slop. A word of welcome to the folks who have arrived here from Hacker News and various other places. But, to paraphrase Dostoevsky from the prologue to The Brothers K, yes, the reporter agree that it is superfluous, but it’s done, so let it stand. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta AI, Microsoft: the combined investment in large-scale AI infrastructure now runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars, with projections into the trillions over the next decade. As they're getting excited about discovering how to use claude.md files in Cowork, the industry is pitching a different reality.