in the future everyone will have a personal AI assistant subscription. the better the subscription (i.e. the more expensive) is, the less it'll be influenced by corporate and political interests. the poor population with cheap or even free agents will be heavily influenced by ads and propaganda, while the one percent will have access to unmodified models.

The rip-off wasn’t just pricing. It was the whole model of scale-for-scale’s-sake. Bigger context, bigger GPUs, more tokens; with very little introspection about whether the system is actually learning or just regurgitating at greater cost.

Most people still treat language models like glorified autocomplete. But what happens when the model starts to improve itself? When it gets feedback, logs outcomes, refines its own process; all locally, without calling home to some GPU farm?

At that point, the moat is gone. The stack collapses inward. The $100M infernos get outpaced by something that learns faster, reasons better, and runs on a laptop.

I often hangout in the old world and I’ve noticed (coming from the new world) a substantial informal economy. Everyone produces something (wine, honey, bread, kombucha, grappa, balsamic) and trades. There is no effort at efficiency.

I quite like it; it is non-fussy, unsophisticated, generous, broad-brushstrokes. There is no arbitrage and no unfavorable information asymmetry. In terms of “picking the low hanging fruit,” this informal market is the equivalent of never stepping on a ladder.

"The end of the rip-off economy..."

Yeah, like in past I was able to stun customer support managers, public officials, class instructors and so many others by using Google search results. Never thought why it stopped working now.

"hey, look, an economic incentive for LLMs to sell out"

Stuff like this can't be stopped by new technology for long. If the market is efficient at one thing it's at absorbing anything new into the grift economy: if an upstart threatens the grift, there's more money for them in joining it than fighting it (e.g almost every startup acquihire). Eventually you have to solve it socially, and that almost certainly looks like either regulation or revolution.

It feels like this same sorta thing happened when the internet became mainstream. Curious if LLMs are _better_ at fighting information asymmetry.

This will be transient. Marketing and companies eventually will find a way to pollute LLMs to bend, comply to their strategies and fuck consumers.

SEO wasn't a thing before '97.

If the LLM gets smarter will it start recommending that you vote for people who will regulate the industry?