Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

throwway120385

It seems like the rent seeking class is just moving to selling you access to LLMs in data centers by the token. In the past, the "rent-seeking class" being described here was at least part of the middle class. Now a few billionaires are going to capture all of the value, but the rent-seeking isn't going away.

guzfip

> How often do you diligently check Uber and Lyft and select the cheaper one? Almost always nowadays lol. Shit I’ve gotten poorer over the past few years.

johngossman

Like self-driving taxis where the business model is to stop paying drivers so we can pay more to big tech companies. Viva la revolution!

qoez

I'm not sure I buy the "everyone will be AI coding to replace things that cost money with their own apps" idea. I only have so much limited time in my day (and only so many tokens on my claude account per week). It's probably going to make more sense for me to buy a tool that's been given human attention over the span of weeks over something i prompt into existence in a few hours (especially if I need 10 such tools to accomplish something).

1970-01-01

Let's not gloss over the electrical supply. These chips won't work for free.

notfried

This is a highly sensational take that is basically fan fiction. From "the era of purposefully frustrating humans is over", to "the added bonus of the collapse of the US economy. Frankly, it’s well deserved." and "everyone in the world is rooting for the Chinese models"; nothing of that is grounded in reality. The Chinese models are open source because they are not state of the art. Once they catch-up or lead, they will likely close them down by a government mandate. Just like Meta was fine with Llama being open source but once they started to get close to OpenAI/Google/Anthropic, they shifted their language to "maybe we won't keep doing that." The idea that AI will end the "rent-seeking class" that has effectively existed for thousands of years is... not going to happen! The business model just adjusts. And if AI is going to be an economy-shaping super disruptor, the cloud-hosted models will continue evolving beyond what you could ever run at home under the desk.

danans

> The best anyone can hope for is a free market, with everything properly priced. But for decades, the American market has not been free. It’s used purposefully added friction to exploit a time asymmetry between the business and you. A free market that is "properly priced" is a not a real state of existence. Resource and information asymmetry, and the exploitation by the those with resource and information privilege of those without it has been present from the very beginning. A free market is just a tool (among many) to achieve a goal for a society. For some, that goal is explicitly the concentration of wealth and welfare in very few hands. This is oligarchy. For others, it's the advantaging the welfare and dignity of their "tribe" at the cost of welfare and dignity to perceived outsiders. And for yet others, it is the advancement of universal welfare and dignity. Neither a free market nor socialism gets you any of these. What gets you there are the shared narratives that utilize tools like free markets, regulation, and redistribution.

palmotea

> The best anyone can hope for is a free market, with everything properly priced. But for decades, the American market has not been free. It’s used purposefully added friction to exploit a time asymmetry between the business and you. And due to things like call centers, this has been very profitable for the businesses. Cable companies and insurance rely on the fact that your time is more valuable than theirs. They can hire people in India at scale to waste your time. They can use procedure and big data to design protocols to drive you just to the point of frustration at little cost to them. How often do you diligently check Uber and Lyft and select the cheaper one? > Enter AI, the great equalizer of time. I didn't read any futher: this article is dumb. If a company has the capability to hire literal people to waste your time, they can deploy more AI than you to waste the time of your AI. Or they just use price to limit access instead of time. Which means you're totally SOL if you have time but no money. Pay to win, that game everyone loves /s! AI doesn't flatten asymmetries, it exacerbates them.

PaulHoule

"But like people who are good with computers, the models want a terminal, not some candy ass iPad UI." Back before the iPhone I used to get into arguments with HCI specialists that phones could be like butlers and should know with all the sensors that they have that you put it in your bag and behaved accordingly. I was told that was impossible then but it seems more possible now. Had the world gone at all that way we'd have a freakin' API to make a restaurant reservation and wouldn't have to go through multimodal hell.

ej88

Im starting to believe that the biggest moats will be in the application layer, and that people are starting to realize traditional saas moats apply to those companies too network effects, distribution, proprietary data, systems of record companies like opencode have none of the above cursor's distribution has been faltering and they're hard pivoting to training their own models with their proprietary data to try to build their moat back

OrangePilled

1. This gentleman appears to write with an optimism that befits a sliver of society. 2. Anthropic does not care about what models and hardware he is running under his desk. 3. When you look behind the cupboard—Anthropic is "rent seeking" on a level well above consumers. 4. I've got "AI safety" + "Capitalism" + "Military-industrial complex" bound together on my mental corkboard.

happytoexplain

>The best anyone can hope for is a free market, with everything properly priced This is an oxymoron.

someguydave

"But like people who are good with computers, the models want a terminal, not some candy ass iPad UI." Giving functionally illiterate people computers with GUIs should be regarded as a mistake.

matthest

It's undeniable that technology over the past decades has increased democratization in something every step of the way. YouTube destroyed Hollywood's monopolization of entertainment. Anyone with a smartphone now has a shot at becoming a full-time creator. Prior to this, it was gate kept by Hollywood execs. Smartphones destroyed Microsoft's monopolization of apps. Not a leap to believe this will happen to some extent with AI (and it's already happening to some degree).

ReptileMan

To me it seems like the rent seeking is everywhere and getting strong in all facets of our lives. Tech companies, utilities, marketplaces, car companies, appliance companies - everyone is pushing subscriptions, gate keeping features and milking every possible dime.

jmyeet

This argument is a bit scattered. "Rent seeking" is being misused here. It's a relatively new term (~50 years old) but it has a lot of history behind it, specifically with enclosures . The Enclosure Acts [1] were a series of laws that took what was common property open to all and made them private property. This was embryonic capitalism [2]. Anyway, I remember that Google demo of making restaurant reservations. I believe it was scripted and had a human fallback. Little did we know that Google would drop the bag on the whole transformer thing that came out soon after. I wouldn't be surprised if it was some of the same people involved. What the author is talking about isn't rent-seeking per se but a moat . The entire proposition of OpenAI is that they can build a moat and recoup the billions of investment. I'm not convinced that's true, which is part of the author's point, for some of the same reasons: 1. Cost of hardware and training and tokens keeps going down. We saw the same thing with Bitcoin mining. I wonder if we'll see ASICs enter the fray here too; and 2. China will make sure no one company owns this future. DeepSeek was a shot across the bow of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. It is a national security issue for China. Where I disagree is that this will be an end for the rent-seeking class. I think we're bouldering towards a dystopian future of even more wealth concentration where most people get displaced by automation and AI, which suppresses wages and ultimately leads to a situation where a handful of people have all the money and almost everyone else has no money. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_act [2]: https://medium.com/@jrcoleman97/the-hidden-origins-of-capita...

GeoAtreides

ah yes, capitalism is over because the chinese are benevolent people that just give away the goose that lays golden eggs out of the goodness of their hearts this will continue forever and no rugs, chinese or otherwise, will ever be pulled we know that because the label on the rug says "open source"

brookst

I find it amusing and, IDK, charming how “rent-seeking” has become a general purpose pejorative, like “bourgeoisie” was at one time.

theturtletalks

> Over the past fifty years, the U.S. economy built a giant rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, brand familiarity substitutes for diligence, and most people are willing to accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value depended on those constraints persisting. – Citrini Research Agentic commerce will render Amazon and the rest of the rent seeking marketplaces obsolete given enough time. Because LLMs can literally go straight to the seller and perform checkout, do market research to make sure the seller is legit, and the seller can sell for lower than on the marketplace since they aren’t paying a 15-20% cut.

SpicyLemonZest

> The best anyone can hope for is a free market, with everything properly priced. But for decades, the American market has not been free. It’s used purposefully added friction to exploit a time asymmetry between the business and you. And due to things like call centers, this has been very profitable for the businesses. I just think this analysis is wrong from the start. The "proper" pricing structure, the one tracking the actual costs involved, would be that you don't get to talk to a human being at all unless you pay for their time. Human frictions are what allow no-charge customer support to exist.