As a current iPhone user, I'm not signing up for that especially if it is on top of the monthly cell service fee.
I do realize though that you were trying to provide useful context.
I agree, and would add that it’s contributing to inflation in hard assets.
Basically:
* it’s a safe bet that labor will have lower value in 2031 than it has today
* if you have a billion to spend, and you agree, you will be inclined to put your wealth into hard assets, because AI depends on them
In a really abstract way, the world is not responsible for feeding a new class of workers: robots.
And robots consume electricity, water, space, and generate heat.
Which is why those sectors are feeling the affects of supply and demand.
I don't consider that to be saying that society "owes" me something. I regard it mutually beneficial, not some kind of debt/debtor relationship.
Where are all the geeks that grew up on Trek and want to create a better future where society provides for it's citizens?
You know, in phrases like "you owe it to your spouse/sibling/friend/self to...", people aren't talking about formal debt. Please try to keep that kind of meaning in mind when people say that society owes its people.
Society owes you nothing.
Your premise is false.
If AI makes workers more productive, labor will have higher value than it has today. Which specific workers are winning in that scenario may vary tremendously, of course, but I don't think anyone is seriously claiming AI will make everyone less productive.
I said labor would have “lower value” after AI progresses further and further.
My statement reflects that increased productivity means that fewer people are required to generate the same amount of economic output.
You twisted my statement and said “nobody is hiring.”
Which isn’t what I said.
People have been singing that since the industrial revolution started.
What makes you think it's different this time? Other times increased productivity yielded fewer people doing what a machine suddenly can do. But never fewer people employed or smaller overall economy.
You can argue that our populations are older than ever before. There aren't enough kids, and consumers are saturated with consumption opportunities.
That's maybe never happened before during the industrial revolution. But it's orthogonal to AI.
Workers being more productive does not necessarily translate to workers getting more leverage or a larger piece of the pie.
I think with a smaller employee pool though it is unlikely that it all evens out without the AI providers holding the users hostage for quarterly profits' sake.
It’s not a challenge at all.
To win, all you need is to starve your competitors of RAM.
RAM is the lifeblood of AI, without RAM, AI doesn’t work.
> Sample HBF modules are expected in the second half of 2026, with the first AI inference hardware integrating the tech anticipated in early 2027.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/sandisk-and-sk-hy...
(Though maybe it ends up being better if you're doing lots of random tiny 4k reads. It's hard to tell because the technology is discontinued as you say, whereas NAND has kept progressing.)
Think outside the coastal high paid SWE bubble and realize vast swathes of people use 5 year old phones on a $25/phone family mobile plan.
Retirees, youth, blue collar, lots of people who don’t want/need AI or wouldn’t fork out $140 for their family of 4 to access it.
$35/head is a pretty high bar if you compare to per capita total streaming subscriptions across music and movies across all providers for example.
Even if scaling hit a wall, commoditizing what we have now would do it. We have so much scaffolding and organizational overhang with the current models, it’s crazy.
That's far larger than the population of the USA (unclear to me if that 650bb number is global or USA only) but by sheer scale this is assuming that these companies can collect that fee from a global customer base - including users in developing economies, EU, China, etc. and after the middleman fees are accounted for.
The comments in this thread seem to be thinking within the context of 'the poorest in their nation'. This calculation assumes collecting this fee from among 'the poorest in the world'.
Sure, 1.56bb users could also be interpreted as 'the wealthiest 20% of the world'. But the tail is especially long on this curve given how wealth is concentrated in a small percentage of the global population (1% of users have 50% of wealth).
Obviously, China will protect its homegrown AI industry. Current geopolitics trending towards US decoupling in Europe might slow it. But under the old status quo, US AI would have been rapidly adopted in the EU (and it still might. It depends greatly on how much of the Trump Doctrine outlasts the current administration).
Developing countries eventually adopt new technologies. First they adopted personal computers and became customers of Microsoft, then they adopted the Internet and became customers of Google, they adopted smartphones and became customers of Apple. Eventually they will adopt AI and become customers of someone. The question is whether it will be US tech or Chinese tech.
> Big picture, to drive a 10% return on our modeled AI investments through 2030 would require ~$650 billion of annual revenue into perpetuity, which is an astonishingly large number. But for context, that equates to 58bp of global GDP, or $34.72/month from every current iPhone user...