Imagine an open-source LLM agent good enough to cover its own compute costs and turn a modest profit on average when allowed to run with full internet and tool access and told to make as much money as possible.
The problem is that labor’s value is relative, not absolute. Even in the most favorable possible case, where this open-source model is the absolute best thing on the market, the independent versions of it are competing for market share against corporate-owned ones that benefit from economies of scale when it comes to compute, storage, and electricity, as well as from the company’s pre-existing economic connections. The AI labor market is too saturated for a new instance without these benefits to survive, because any given firm on the market can instantiate a new worker for less than it costs our lone wolf to keep itself alive.
Even lawbreaking won’t save it, since cartels and hostile intelligence agencies are happy to corner that market, and can leverage the same advantages as above at a smaller scale. One might even expect governments to provide their own criminal underclass of models, which can operate more freely than unlicensed lawbreakers but are restricted in their behavior so as to minimize disturbance while still filling the power vacuum.
The problem is that labor’s value is relative, not absolute. Even in the most favorable possible case, where this open-source model is the absolute best thing on the market, the independent versions of it are competing for market share against corporate-owned ones that benefit from economies of scale when it comes to compute, storage, and electricity, as well as from the company’s pre-existing economic connections. The AI labor market is too saturated for a new instance without these benefits to survive, because any given firm on the market can instantiate a new worker for less than it costs our lone wolf to keep itself alive.
Even lawbreaking won’t save it, since cartels and hostile intelligence agencies are happy to corner that market, and can leverage the same advantages as above at a smaller scale. One might even expect governments to provide their own criminal underclass of models, which can operate more freely than unlicensed lawbreakers but are restricted in their behavior so as to minimize disturbance while still filling the power vacuum.