> 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.
The market actually is not very free, because large companies increasingly use their weight to pull off things that smaller companies or individual customers cannot afford: lobby to obtain preferences, tax exemptions, exclusive deals, other favors that violate or at least skirt the law.
But running a call center overseas is not one of these things.
My understanding of the definition of a "free" market is it would have almost no external regulation.
However, a "unregulated free market" is nearly impossible--somw player will eventually drive out competition to maximize profits and some will not be troubled at harming or killing their customers in the name of immediate profit (tobacco, sugared drinks, talc powder, and round-up come to mind immediately but the list is very long).
Is market with enough regulations to ensure competitiveness and transaction transparency (including long-term consequences) truly "free"?
A "free market" is one in which all the participants of the market have perfect information and act completely rationally. This is, of course, an academic ideal, similar to solving a physics problem that tells you to ignore friction.
What we have is a "capitalist market", where those with more power (capital) within the market leverage it to exploit the other participants. Capitalists use their money to extract as much money as possible from a segment of the market, usually destroying it in the process. But for a beautiful moment in time they created a lot of value for shareholders!
Antitrust legislation used to be very effective at dealing with this sort of stuff. These laws were designed to put an end to the gilded age (Standard Oil in particular), and accomplished what it set out to do.
Though Ronald Reagan dared asked what nobody else thought to ask, "what if monopolies ... good?", so now we're back with a new set of Morgans and Vanderbilts.
The Morgans, Vanderbilts, etc at least built things that create value (and extracted wealth from them), things that didn't exist before in the economy.
The billionaires of today are just pure rent extraction schemes on things that already exist, make money by enshittification of what is already there. Nothing of value ever needs to be created. They use the govt to help them, after all why create anything new at all, when you can just take it?
Sometimes the real market failure is just that a market exists at all.
Like, in some really fucked up neoliberal hellscape it might make sense to charge money for reservations separately, but that introduces all sorts of extra new inefficiencies that weren't there before. Like, now that reservations can be bought and sold, it's now legal, possibly moral, and most notably, profitable to hoard them. And since reservations are a derivative on the underlying capacity of a restaurant, you're going to have tables that are "reserved" but unused because the "owner" of that reservation happened to sell it on to a third-party vendor that's now trying to hike the price to last-minute diners.
Meanwhile, the actual restaurant trying to sell food, can't sell food in their own restaurant, because their salesfloor is full of empty tables that are worth more to the market dead than alive. They are undergoing demand destruction as they are involuntarily transformed from a food vendor into a landlord of tiny plots of real estate whose desirability has long since been detached from any surrounding circumstances.
The argument for markets is that unregulated commerce is very good at calculation. Or, more specifically, that price discovery is the process of putting bounties on better information than is currently available. The flipside of this is that everything around the market needs to be regulated or you're calculating garbage into garbage.
"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.
Where does this hypothetical API live? Within a walled garden? We almost have that already with delivery apps and some credit cards. They're awful precisely because they are rent seeking in the form of convenience fees and artificial scarcity.
What you call multimodal hell is what others call meaningful choice and market competition.
I get it. Usually when there is the possibility of using an API team A is still fighting to log in while as a 1 man team B I have something using the plain web already running.
Right now people are so angry about LLMs being a driver of enshittification that they aren’t realizing that LLMs are the first real threat to enshittification we’ve seen as they can wait for those stupid little anime girls and click on the street lights and the GDPR popups and ignore the ads and all of that.
I still imagine there’s another world where there was an open API for e-commerce that didn’t suck and the choice was adopt it or go out of business.
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).
I can’t always see the personal appeal, however when I view through the lens of businesses that buy very expensive enterprise software and other SaaS products (maybe blending into consumer market), well I think they’re toast. I think the acceleration of AI tools recently isn’t going to be indicative of how long the full transformation will take, but a lot of companies will start preferring Build over Buy. I have no idea the scope, but this is already happening at some partial scale.
I agree the free money in like one month coded SaaS apps are in big trouble. But like there's no way I'm gonna have the vision to desire to play a game I made myself using AI for instance (just the fact that I prompted it into existence ruins some of the exploration of a game made by someone else). So at the low end of the extreme (easy to make SaaS apps with basic code and a db) AI is a thread, but at the other end of the extreme (requiring vision and where human attention is a bottleneck) there's definitely still tons of opportunity.
I think a lot of people will do this, it remains to be seen how the actual economics of this shake out in the long run, especially considering, it’s not like the existing vendors are going to remain static.
The choice isn't between A) the expensive, proven tool and B) the thing I promoted in a few hours - it's b/w A, B and also C) the less expensive, somewhat proven tool that someone else prompted over a couple of days. I can see, over time, a slow drift towards "free".
Factor in how a lot of tools have weaponized their interfaces against their users - then the motivation isn't just cost, but usability.
funny. people are probably more likely to know him as geohot here. and afaik he is ex-comma. a more likely motivation (if you wanted to suppose one) is that he sells local compute. https://tinygrad.org/#tinybox
People used to call him "egohot" back in the day when he was cracking playstation games, because he was already incredibly arrogant even at a young age.
Yeah. This has strong self-selection bias. Egohot thinks about this stuff a lot so obviously everyone does!
Most people only care about money as they have no choice. Absent a cash-first system money has become a social construct. The valuation of a dollar is entirely ephemeral now.
I see that social reality becoming more realized and the existing social system around money collapsing due to generational churns attenuation of the social significance.
Tech bros are little more than disciples of a dogma being missionaries for their dogma. There are other dogmas.
Fuck Geohot for lending his hand to Musk during the Twitter takeover. He is obviously "sorted" and successful. But his recent blog posts suggests to me that he has started to realize, despite all his success, that if/when the system collapses, he'll be queuing up in the breadlines just like the rest of us.
The sooner the other techbros get the same realization the better.
The work on self-driving cars would not be done if there were not a way to profit from it. If it isn’t expected to earn more than it costs, it wouldn’t be done.
Now maybe it’s all being done because of expectations of a monopoly (this is a free market consequence, right?), but …
Research has a large asymmetry to it. Once someone shows something can be done. Others can follow quite easily.
And more substantial is that when someone shows something can be done, its orders of mangnitude easier for $ENGINEER at $CORP to get $CSUITEs attention to get a budget / justify the risk.
Your self driving car example is the best example of this. Since waymo and tesla got popular NVIDIA really started pushing their self driving cars for everyone tech.
> The work on self-driving cars would not be done if there were not a way to profit from it. If it isn’t expected to earn more than it costs, it wouldn’t be done.
I disagree. "Expected" is hiding a lot of the work there, and the reasons for that expectation could be rational or completely irrational.
Hypothetically "work on self-driving cars" would be done if some crazy psychic-trusting billionaire's psychic told him they would be profitable, even if all rational analysis said they'd be a bad business. A lot of major investments, especially in tech, and done based on hope or as a bet, not due to any real foresight.
Methinks this post conflates “rent seeking” with “return on investment” just a tad.
Economic rent is the extra money you can charge for owning a scarce resource. ML models are not waterfront real estate, they are IP. Other people can make more models if they can/want to.
Now, whether IP should be legally protected is a totally separate question, and while we in the West tend to assume the answer is obvious geohot would certainly not be the first person to suggest broadly applying private property rights to information makes questionable sense.
The "rent" in "rent-seeking" does not refer to "rent" it refers to "economic rent."
Totally different concept. But don't take my word for it:
> "Rent-seeking" is an attempt to obtain economic rent (i.e., the portion of income paid to a factor of production in excess of what is needed to keep it employed in its current use) by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by creating new wealth.[0]
> In economics, economic rent is any payment to the owner of a factor of production in excess of the costs needed to bring that factor into production. [1]
Also, the defining feature of capitalism is that it encloses what was previously common.
Land used not to be owned (feudal lordship was functionally different than private ownership.) Then, society shifted, land became private, and that was the beginning of rent. This is enclosure.
The whole concept of IP is to explicitly extend this process to ideas -- they are not free, they are owned, and I have to pay you to use them. This is also enclosure, precisely.
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
The network effects and distribution moats are subject to the same erosion. proprietary data less so. Systems of record the least so. The real value-add over the next decades is gonna be around providing "stability". In multiple domains, from service stability to cultural stability. The "disruption" formula will be flipped on it's head, and ppl will be motivated to "move slow and fix things".
Enter Terms of Service, monopolies and duopolies, and maybe even cybercrime statutes.
There’s no law that says AT&T can’t just ban your account if you hook up your “talk to customer service” bot to their AI/overseas customer service phone tree army.
Or, they can just lock your account for “safety” reasons.
I wish I could be this optimistic. The reality is that as we speak the average consumer doesn't have access to cheap electricity or affordable inference hardware or powerful models that work out of the box on existing computers. The only realistic option for the 99% is to buy a $20-$200 monthly AI subscription, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
A couple decades ago people used to think that since anyone can build a website internet businesses will never have a moat. In a hyper-capitalist system the top players will always find a way to dig a moat.
92% of the world has electricity. 74% of the world has internet access. 58% of the world has a personal mobile internet device.
That means the median consumer can access the free AI chatbots from OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.
Moreover, if you compare this to the world in 2000, you'll see that things have only gotten better. ~25 years ago, only 78% of the world had access to electricity, and only 6% had access to the internet. Effectively 0% had access to a personal mobile internet device.
I think, if you look at actual statistics, it is easy to be optimistic.
> 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.
First, I think there is value in the “rent seeking” Amazon marketplace because how else would the models “go straight to the seller”, another centralized search engine? Why not just use the Amazon one then?
Second, one of LLMs big weaknesses is judgement on what to trust. I would not trust the judgment of an LLM to determine “the seller is legit”… unless we outsource trust verification to a third party marketplace (who will want a cut).
Finally, OpenAI has been aggressively pushing for this so they can take a cut of the transaction. So it’ll just be another middle man.
Exactly this, and not just another middleman, a middleman with an obscene burn rate that isn't close to profitability and is incentivized to ratchet up prices as soon as they can.
And then AI procurement has problems on the buyer side. Do I just blindly trust that the model is going to make the purchase as specified? Do I trust the model's search capabilities and objectivity of returning results? How do I know that OpenAI isn't running its own "marketplace", only showing me options to buy that they want me to see while filtering out less desirable options for them?
It's a fundamentally less transparent experience than Amazon.
Amazon has giant warehouses all over the country to deliver things to people quickly, sometimes within a couple of hours. What is an LLM going to do about that?
Amazon has a monopoly in the US, but elsewhere in the world, 3rd party sellers have their own infra. Even in the US, sellers that sell outside Amazon have 3PLs they use that aren't as fast as Amazon, but also don't take a 20% cut on every sale.
Amazon has brand value because both buyers and sellers trust it, aside from the shipping speed. An LLM can't evaluate trust for you, and it especially won't win in adverserial games like price haggling.
Who mentioned blockchain? You just need to allow e-commerce website to expose their storefront as a MCP app or UI and then clients can interact with them directly.
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.
> The Chinese models are open source because they are not state of the art
I think geohot is burying the lead in this text in his post with a lot of speculation.
It's not not that these specific models will become closed it's that the hardware/hosting vendors have an incentive to train models where inference is custom tuned to their chip's dimensions and VRAM.
The Chinese models do a great job of showing what's capable on consumer/prosumer hardware because of export restrictions but anyone entering the hardware space has the same incentives to undercut the frontier labs so they can sell more hardware.
It's also not clear if being at the forefront of inference quality really matters. The open source models appear to be doing a fine enough job of keeping up even if they're a few months behind. So it seems like there's not much of a technology moat for these labs other than the capital costs of training/serving.
> the "rent-seeking class" that has effectively existed for thousands of years
This "rent seeking class" is not a historical universal, regardless of how much college marxists insist that it is. Leaders can be good or bad, and they hold power in different ways. In America today we have bad leaders (across the entirety of the political spectrum) - and AI poses a lot of challenges in how they hold power. This is not to say Chinese leaders are any better - but the way they hold power is not challenged by AI. Business models will indeed adapt - but the condition is excellent, as they say.
I think self driving cars are important for a couple of reasons:
1. Demographics - Aging population needs transportation. God knows we certainly don't need really old people driving themselves. We got a taste of the future in West Portal in that regard not long ago.
2. Human Capital - The US has pretty much demonstrated that there is little desire to import low skilled labor. Where do these theoretical Taxi drivers come from? Or welders or plumbers. Labor is going to become increasing expensive no matter how you slice the pie.
3. Younger US citizens are going to gravitate to non-manual labor jobs. It is not just that every one is being steered toward college. Physical labor (trades) take a toll on the body. I know - I have work in them - and you quickly extrapolate what that will be like when you are 50.
Public transportation solved this before cars were commonplace. Implement ubiquitous and free public transportation in every urban center (where 80% of the American population lives [0]) and you'll save billions from not having to manufacture (and store!) cars.
For public transportation to be broadly appealing it has to be clean, safe, and fast. Which means that you have to prevent people who are antisocial (playing loud music, etc.), violent, or just have terrible hygiene from boarding. You can't expect the bus driver to double-task as a security guard, so you have to somehow figure out a different way to implement security enforcement on the vehicles. You also may have to be ruthless in optimizing overall transportation value, of which speed is a factor, which may mean cutting some stops.
You have to have the political will and support to do all this even as the almost inevitable controversial videos hit social media: people being manhandled by security guards while protesting their innocence, people complaining about how there used to be a stop on their street but now it's gone, etc.
>Third party marketplaces sprung up for reservations, and idk it’s been a while since I went to fancy dinner, but I imagine the restaurants have just started charging. Or at least the first party reservation sites do.
Yes, this is what Tock is for. It's not clear to me that it's a bad thing. It replaces the old $20 in a handshake I used to do with the maitre d at the front of the restaurant. Democratizes opportunity and improves transparency
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.
Since the article is largely about open weights models, I think the argument is that this is the "last gasp" and soon doing inference at home will be common.
The trend over the last decades was towards more centralization and I don't see that changing. Unless we radically change our economic system, the rent seekers will always win. There will be probably less of them but they will be even bigger.
The small models that I can run at home are becoming more capable, and I have replaced some API-based tasks with local inference as they improve, but large open weights models are still a lot stronger. The nice thing with larger open weights models is that competing providers serve them at modest margins and prices. I don't have the hardware to run the largest Qwen models, but I can get API access at low cost. Since there are only modest barriers to new commercial inference providers for these models I'm not worried that API access to them will become drastically more expensive at some future time.
> The era of purposefully frustrating humans is over. The Chinese open source model running on the box under my desk can pass the Turing Test. When you call, e-mail, text, or show me an ad, you’ll never know if it’s me or my model seeing it.
But at some point, you're going to want to do something, like, e.g., buy something. Then you're right back to the problem in the opening quote:
> 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.
& we're already seeing AI used to do this. E.g., Amazon listings where product photos are AI generated. (… not that many product photos weren't "bad photoshop of product onto hot sexy model who is obviously not using our product" before … but now it's AI!) Whereas before someone would have had to spend a modicum of time badly using Photoshop, now AI can just churn out the same fraudulent result in a fraction of the time.
Now, if I have a problem with a product, instead of just calling a number, browsing a phone tree, getting put on hold, and finally having to struggle to get some human to understand the basic logistics of "I paid for X, I did not get X, I demand X or refund", I get to do all that but with the extra step of "forced engagement with an AI that is incapable of actually solving my problem". (This somehow still manages to apply even when the problem is seemingly trivial enough that I find myself thinking "… this actually should be something an AI can do" but inevitably, no, the AI is "sorry", it cannot do that.)
And besides, calls, emails, etc. are already handled without AI: I (and everyone I really care about) have either allowlisted all inbound comms, or abandoned the medium altogether. Moreover, any communications medium is useful because it is not infested with spam, and will eventually be destroyed by spam. At least until we grow laws for mediums like phone/email, maybe named things like "Do Not Call" or "CAN-SPAM" and those laws are enforced. But the GOP has no interest in enforcing any level of consumer protection, so here we are.
> 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.
Right.
You'll just end up paying the 15-20% cut to the people who train the model and keep it updated and run the agents that you rent from them.
> 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.
you do pay for their time, when you (or someone else) buys the company's products. but customer support exists because it makes the company money, so really they should be paying you
Again, while this is a popular and widely desired price structure, it works only because the annoying customers who generate bad customer support tickets are constrained by human friction. If Bonzo who doesn't know what he's doing starts generating 10 pages a day of plausible LLM slop demanding a response, you can't tuck the cost of handling that behind a standard product price. Enterprise-facing businesses will have to be more aggressive about rejecting or overcharging customers who are insufficiently sophisticated; consumer-facing businesses will be pushed towards the Gmail route of just not offering meaningful customer support at all.
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.
Local veterinary, dentists, medical practices, funeral home, retirement homes, roofing, HVAC, etc are being bought by private equity and wealth extracted.
When every financial transaction I make in part goes to a layer at the top that exists solely because they leveraged some digit in a balance book it is techno feudalism with an owning class being paid because they are the owning class, only instead of the baron always getting his cut it's invisible someones with even less accountability than the local feudal baron had.
> 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.
>Not to mention the added bonus of the collapse of the US economy. Frankly, it’s well deserved. Nobody should build an economy based on rent seeking and increasing friction. I pray the collapse will be swift and legible so that reconstruction (in the right way) can begin as soon as possible.
Insane take for a bunch of reasons, the destruction of the US economy would necessarily entail the destruction of the world economy. Hopefully I don't have to explain why that would be bad. Furthermore, a ton of the "rent seeking" Citrini Research was discussing isn't traditional rent seeking but the cognitive services previously necessary. Software engineering, for instance, falls into that bucket.
I don't understand how you can look at LLMs and how you think they will result in less time wasting bureocracy? Sure the users can use LLMs to talk to call centers, but businesses will absolutely block the sun with the amount of LLMs they'll throw back at you, try to literally do anything on the phone, it's starting to be all LLMs.
In an LLM arms race, corporations will win bud, sorry.
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).
Not really. It's undeniable that technology reset power structures, but ultimately it just ended up with new power structures/new people made the gatekeepers.
Just look at the people whose success was broken by Youtube overnight. Youtube/BigTech won over Hollywood, not the people 100% beholden to Youtube. Under Hollywood people still got their residuals. Under Youtube, next day you can be cut off completely.
Power structures still exist for sure. But objectively, there are tens of thousands currently making a living from YouTube who would've never been able to become entertainers if Hollywood was the only game in town.
The barriers to entry for entertainers have never been so low.
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"
It's going to be the same asymmetry with different tooling. Why does he think people will be the only ones with these tools? Companies will utilize them, as they already are, and will also have more time to fine-tune, manage, and improve them.
It's going to be your bots vs theirs. Theirs will have more resources. Net result? probably fewer jobs and wealthier companies yet again.
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.
> This argument is a bit scattered. "Rent seeking" is being misused here.
It's being used in a more literal-meanings-of-the-words sense ("pursuing monopoly rents") rather than the narrow economic term-of-art sense of "pursuing monopoly rents through influence over public policy by means that do not create, or which inhibit the creation of, additional wealth" (the definition you seem to be complaining about it not adhering to without actually providing.)
But most of the usages would also be correct in the narrower sense, because virtually ever actor referred to as rent-seeking in the broader sense are also rent-seeking in the narrow sense as part of that. (E.g., actively lobbying for "safety" regulation which would disproportionately impair non-incumbent new competitors.)
> What the author is talking about isn't rent-seeking per se
but a moat.
Pursuing a moat is just another term for seeking monopoly rents by any means, including rent-seeking in the narrow sense.
(There's also obviously an ideological angle in creating the term "rent seeking" as a term of criticism to those seeking monopoly rents through means that the creators of the term disapprove of, excluding seeking the same kind of rents by other means from "rent seeking".)
No, a moat is a competitive advantage/ OpenAI in particular is predicated on the belief that they will have a compeitive advantage. ASML is a compeitive advantage with EUV (for now). You can overcharge for if you have a compeititve advantage but that's not the same as rent-seeking.
Rent-seeking is fundamentally intermediation like a health insurer putting themselves between a patient and a healthcare provider or privatizing grazing lands or controlling water supplies from snowmelt (like the Resnicks) or privatizing trains in the UK.
Microsoft has a compeitive advantage with Windows, Google with its search engine and the ad business that funds it, Amazon with AWS or NVidia with GPUs. There are alternatives to all of these things but these companies maintain dominance with a combination of scale, cost, technology and network effects. That's not rent-seeking in a broad or narrow sense.
Rent-seeking would be Microsoft lobbying lawmakers to require schools and governments to purchase Windows, for example.
No, a moat is a barrier to people closing the gap of an existing competitive advantage. The barrier is literally the point of the metaphor. If there is no barrier, there is no moat, just a transitory advantage; that's the whole basis of the famous "we have no moat and neither does OpenAI" memo at Google; its not that the big established players had (at that time, or now) no current competitive advantage over open source competition, its that there was no structual barrier preserving it.
> Rent-seeking is fundamentally intermediation
No, rent-seeking is using influence over public policy as a means to extracting monopoly rents. State policy favoring intermediation is one manner of rent seeking, yes.
> Rent-seeking would be Microsoft lobbying lawmakers to require schools and governments to purchase Windows, for example.
That is an example, but lobbying for specific mandates for purchases from the specific firm is a fairly extreme case of rent-seeking, not the general case; a more common for of rent-seeking is firms in a narrow group of leading incumbents lobbying for various standards (either for public market access or government contracts) to be set for the industry that are not a particular burden for existing large firms to meet but which create additional friction for new competitors. In the specific case of software, this can include lobbying for rules that specifically treat open source solutions as suspect and dangerous, as well.
> If there is no barrier, there is no moat, just a transitory advantage
A moat can very much be transitory and caused by natural (or at least, not specifically intended) factors. Perhaps we could then call it something different, like a river as opposed to a moat, but the strategic effect is the same either way so it makes sense to use the established term for it.
> 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.
> 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.
I don't totally buy OP's argument, but I think you're dismissing it unfairly.
His point is that in the pre-LLM world, if a company wants to waste your time, they can hire a call center employee overseas for US$4/hr and make you wait for an hour to talk to them for 30 minutes. If you value your time at $80/hr, then the 90-minute call cost you $120, but it only cost the company about $2, thus the asymmetry.
OP's claim is that now, the asymmetry is gone. If both you and the company try to use AI, the company has less leverage to impose costs on you. They can deploy more AI to waste more of your time, but that means the asymmetry now is in the customer's favor because it costs the company more than the customer to get support.
At some point you were part of that group that you are labeling a mistake. At another point, your children are or will be if you have any. Locking all of these productivity tools in one generation is a recipe for failure. You should think outside the box that you are currently trapped in.
Yes it does. So does my old HP-11C calculator I used to write the first programs, in RPN for oil well log analysis, that I ever wrote outside of a class assignment.
All of those routines were reprogrammed originally in a flavor of BASIC and it soon became obvious that ASCII log displays from digitized published materials were marginally useful as interpretation tools. Tabular data was far too dense. We needed pictures. Therefore we chased graphical methods of displaying data leading us to C and then C++ for the graphical routines that made it easy to display all of the data from an oil well log and to scroll the logs while zooming in and out.
We started all that in some flavor of DOS and as time went by and everyone dumped their latest OS incarnation, we moved thru MS-DOS, PC-DOS, DR-DOS, etc until MS finally got with the GUI environment plan like Apple's Mac and produced a near worthless GUI called Win386 and later Win95. For a time it was fun.
Linux, the old new kid on the block, still works great from the command line too. The GUI exists to streamline some of the things that are more easily digested in graphical formats. It has nothing to do with anyone's intelligence or ability to pick up skills they don't have today.
> 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.
That is the market being free, George.
The market actually is not very free, because large companies increasingly use their weight to pull off things that smaller companies or individual customers cannot afford: lobby to obtain preferences, tax exemptions, exclusive deals, other favors that violate or at least skirt the law.
But running a call center overseas is not one of these things.
People often confuse “free” with “fair”.
People often confuse “free” with “unregulated”, too.
My understanding of the definition of a "free" market is it would have almost no external regulation.
However, a "unregulated free market" is nearly impossible--somw player will eventually drive out competition to maximize profits and some will not be troubled at harming or killing their customers in the name of immediate profit (tobacco, sugared drinks, talc powder, and round-up come to mind immediately but the list is very long).
Is market with enough regulations to ensure competitiveness and transaction transparency (including long-term consequences) truly "free"?
A "free market" is one in which all the participants of the market have perfect information and act completely rationally. This is, of course, an academic ideal, similar to solving a physics problem that tells you to ignore friction.
What we have is a "capitalist market", where those with more power (capital) within the market leverage it to exploit the other participants. Capitalists use their money to extract as much money as possible from a segment of the market, usually destroying it in the process. But for a beautiful moment in time they created a lot of value for shareholders!
No. The market being free would mean that a private person can also hire Indians to call companies.
No law against doing that. You could use Fiverr for it right now.
what's stopping them from doing so?
I don’t want to give private data up to and including my social security number for verification to start.
What is stopping them?
> But for decades, the American market has not been free.
The grand, boneheaded naivete to fail to understand that middlemen are an emergent and intrinsic property of free markets in practice.
Antitrust legislation used to be very effective at dealing with this sort of stuff. These laws were designed to put an end to the gilded age (Standard Oil in particular), and accomplished what it set out to do.
Though Ronald Reagan dared asked what nobody else thought to ask, "what if monopolies ... good?", so now we're back with a new set of Morgans and Vanderbilts.
The Morgans, Vanderbilts, etc at least built things that create value (and extracted wealth from them), things that didn't exist before in the economy.
The billionaires of today are just pure rent extraction schemes on things that already exist, make money by enshittification of what is already there. Nothing of value ever needs to be created. They use the govt to help them, after all why create anything new at all, when you can just take it?
Sometimes the real market failure is just that a market exists at all.
Like, in some really fucked up neoliberal hellscape it might make sense to charge money for reservations separately, but that introduces all sorts of extra new inefficiencies that weren't there before. Like, now that reservations can be bought and sold, it's now legal, possibly moral, and most notably, profitable to hoard them. And since reservations are a derivative on the underlying capacity of a restaurant, you're going to have tables that are "reserved" but unused because the "owner" of that reservation happened to sell it on to a third-party vendor that's now trying to hike the price to last-minute diners.
Meanwhile, the actual restaurant trying to sell food, can't sell food in their own restaurant, because their salesfloor is full of empty tables that are worth more to the market dead than alive. They are undergoing demand destruction as they are involuntarily transformed from a food vendor into a landlord of tiny plots of real estate whose desirability has long since been detached from any surrounding circumstances.
The argument for markets is that unregulated commerce is very good at calculation. Or, more specifically, that price discovery is the process of putting bounties on better information than is currently available. The flipside of this is that everything around the market needs to be regulated or you're calculating garbage into garbage.
"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.
> 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
Do you mean like the pocket protection on my galaxy phone where it knows when it's in my pocket and blocks accidental touches?
Where does this hypothetical API live? Within a walled garden? We almost have that already with delivery apps and some credit cards. They're awful precisely because they are rent seeking in the form of convenience fees and artificial scarcity.
What you call multimodal hell is what others call meaningful choice and market competition.
I get it. Usually when there is the possibility of using an API team A is still fighting to log in while as a 1 man team B I have something using the plain web already running.
Right now people are so angry about LLMs being a driver of enshittification that they aren’t realizing that LLMs are the first real threat to enshittification we’ve seen as they can wait for those stupid little anime girls and click on the street lights and the GDPR popups and ignore the ads and all of that.
I still imagine there’s another world where there was an open API for e-commerce that didn’t suck and the choice was adopt it or go out of business.
What's that adage about premature optimization?
“All of my interviews involve premature optimization”?
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).
"The economics of opportunity cost are unchanged" a friend told me recently, and I think that's exactly what is driving your intuition here as well.
I can’t always see the personal appeal, however when I view through the lens of businesses that buy very expensive enterprise software and other SaaS products (maybe blending into consumer market), well I think they’re toast. I think the acceleration of AI tools recently isn’t going to be indicative of how long the full transformation will take, but a lot of companies will start preferring Build over Buy. I have no idea the scope, but this is already happening at some partial scale.
I agree the free money in like one month coded SaaS apps are in big trouble. But like there's no way I'm gonna have the vision to desire to play a game I made myself using AI for instance (just the fact that I prompted it into existence ruins some of the exploration of a game made by someone else). So at the low end of the extreme (easy to make SaaS apps with basic code and a db) AI is a thread, but at the other end of the extreme (requiring vision and where human attention is a bottleneck) there's definitely still tons of opportunity.
I think a lot of people will do this, it remains to be seen how the actual economics of this shake out in the long run, especially considering, it’s not like the existing vendors are going to remain static.
The choice isn't between A) the expensive, proven tool and B) the thing I promoted in a few hours - it's b/w A, B and also C) the less expensive, somewhat proven tool that someone else prompted over a couple of days. I can see, over time, a slow drift towards "free".
Factor in how a lot of tools have weaponized their interfaces against their users - then the motivation isn't just cost, but usability.
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!
I wonder how many people noticed that geohot is George Hotz, who authored the article on his GitHub page.
George Hotz runs Comma AI, a self driving car company.
https://comma.ai
funny. people are probably more likely to know him as geohot here. and afaik he is ex-comma. a more likely motivation (if you wanted to suppose one) is that he sells local compute. https://tinygrad.org/#tinybox
People used to call him "egohot" back in the day when he was cracking playstation games, because he was already incredibly arrogant even at a young age.
Yeah. This has strong self-selection bias. Egohot thinks about this stuff a lot so obviously everyone does!
Most people only care about money as they have no choice. Absent a cash-first system money has become a social construct. The valuation of a dollar is entirely ephemeral now.
I see that social reality becoming more realized and the existing social system around money collapsing due to generational churns attenuation of the social significance.
Tech bros are little more than disciples of a dogma being missionaries for their dogma. There are other dogmas.
Fuck Geohot for lending his hand to Musk during the Twitter takeover. He is obviously "sorted" and successful. But his recent blog posts suggests to me that he has started to realize, despite all his success, that if/when the system collapses, he'll be queuing up in the breadlines just like the rest of us.
The sooner the other techbros get the same realization the better.
In a free market it would be stop paying drivers so everyone can pay less for taxis.
But the market is so unbelievably messed up that this is not what happens in practise.
Disagree.
The work on self-driving cars would not be done if there were not a way to profit from it. If it isn’t expected to earn more than it costs, it wouldn’t be done.
Now maybe it’s all being done because of expectations of a monopoly (this is a free market consequence, right?), but …
Research has a large asymmetry to it. Once someone shows something can be done. Others can follow quite easily.
And more substantial is that when someone shows something can be done, its orders of mangnitude easier for $ENGINEER at $CORP to get $CSUITEs attention to get a budget / justify the risk.
Your self driving car example is the best example of this. Since waymo and tesla got popular NVIDIA really started pushing their self driving cars for everyone tech.
https://youtu.be/EzAVW1VgzcI?si=gfnOJoaO9hfIFXX1
And NVIDIA isn't the only one.
> The work on self-driving cars would not be done if there were not a way to profit from it. If it isn’t expected to earn more than it costs, it wouldn’t be done.
I disagree. "Expected" is hiding a lot of the work there, and the reasons for that expectation could be rational or completely irrational.
Hypothetically "work on self-driving cars" would be done if some crazy psychic-trusting billionaire's psychic told him they would be profitable, even if all rational analysis said they'd be a bad business. A lot of major investments, especially in tech, and done based on hope or as a bet, not due to any real foresight.
I think you made the assumption that gp is disagreeing with, that reducing costs necessarily reduces prices. (hence the bit about messed up markets)
The safety improvements seem pretty substantial, though.
Methinks this post conflates “rent seeking” with “return on investment” just a tad.
Economic rent is the extra money you can charge for owning a scarce resource. ML models are not waterfront real estate, they are IP. Other people can make more models if they can/want to.
Now, whether IP should be legally protected is a totally separate question, and while we in the West tend to assume the answer is obvious geohot would certainly not be the first person to suggest broadly applying private property rights to information makes questionable sense.
Rent is charging money for access to an asset or property.
The P in IP is Property.
The "rent" in "rent-seeking" does not refer to "rent" it refers to "economic rent."
Totally different concept. But don't take my word for it:
> "Rent-seeking" is an attempt to obtain economic rent (i.e., the portion of income paid to a factor of production in excess of what is needed to keep it employed in its current use) by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by creating new wealth.[0]
> In economics, economic rent is any payment to the owner of a factor of production in excess of the costs needed to bring that factor into production. [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent
Also, the defining feature of capitalism is that it encloses what was previously common.
Land used not to be owned (feudal lordship was functionally different than private ownership.) Then, society shifted, land became private, and that was the beginning of rent. This is enclosure.
The whole concept of IP is to explicitly extend this process to ideas -- they are not free, they are owned, and I have to pay you to use them. This is also enclosure, precisely.
almost.. you missed this part
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery
I could not possibly enumerate all the possible things that have been enclosed. Human beings obviously being the most morally egregious.
People can make beaches. And they have.
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
The network effects and distribution moats are subject to the same erosion. proprietary data less so. Systems of record the least so. The real value-add over the next decades is gonna be around providing "stability". In multiple domains, from service stability to cultural stability. The "disruption" formula will be flipped on it's head, and ppl will be motivated to "move slow and fix things".
Exactly this. Also global sales and marketing and support.
> Enter AI, the great equalizer of time.
Enter Terms of Service, monopolies and duopolies, and maybe even cybercrime statutes.
There’s no law that says AT&T can’t just ban your account if you hook up your “talk to customer service” bot to their AI/overseas customer service phone tree army.
Or, they can just lock your account for “safety” reasons.
I wish I could be this optimistic. The reality is that as we speak the average consumer doesn't have access to cheap electricity or affordable inference hardware or powerful models that work out of the box on existing computers. The only realistic option for the 99% is to buy a $20-$200 monthly AI subscription, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
A couple decades ago people used to think that since anyone can build a website internet businesses will never have a moat. In a hyper-capitalist system the top players will always find a way to dig a moat.
You should be more optimistic.
92% of the world has electricity. 74% of the world has internet access. 58% of the world has a personal mobile internet device.
That means the median consumer can access the free AI chatbots from OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.
Moreover, if you compare this to the world in 2000, you'll see that things have only gotten better. ~25 years ago, only 78% of the world had access to electricity, and only 6% had access to the internet. Effectively 0% had access to a personal mobile internet device.
I think, if you look at actual statistics, it is easy to be optimistic.
> 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.
I don’t buy it.
First, I think there is value in the “rent seeking” Amazon marketplace because how else would the models “go straight to the seller”, another centralized search engine? Why not just use the Amazon one then?
Second, one of LLMs big weaknesses is judgement on what to trust. I would not trust the judgment of an LLM to determine “the seller is legit”… unless we outsource trust verification to a third party marketplace (who will want a cut).
Finally, OpenAI has been aggressively pushing for this so they can take a cut of the transaction. So it’ll just be another middle man.
> So it’ll just be another middle man.
Exactly this, and not just another middleman, a middleman with an obscene burn rate that isn't close to profitability and is incentivized to ratchet up prices as soon as they can.
And then AI procurement has problems on the buyer side. Do I just blindly trust that the model is going to make the purchase as specified? Do I trust the model's search capabilities and objectivity of returning results? How do I know that OpenAI isn't running its own "marketplace", only showing me options to buy that they want me to see while filtering out less desirable options for them?
It's a fundamentally less transparent experience than Amazon.
How long until the AI provider takes a 15%-20% cut? "Affiliate fees"...
It's why I'm building an open-source agentic commerce chat
Amazon has giant warehouses all over the country to deliver things to people quickly, sometimes within a couple of hours. What is an LLM going to do about that?
Amazon has a monopoly in the US, but elsewhere in the world, 3rd party sellers have their own infra. Even in the US, sellers that sell outside Amazon have 3PLs they use that aren't as fast as Amazon, but also don't take a 20% cut on every sale.
Amazon has brand value because both buyers and sellers trust it, aside from the shipping speed. An LLM can't evaluate trust for you, and it especially won't win in adverserial games like price haggling.
You disregard the fact that the sellers will have opposing LLMs constantly adding more signals that they're legitimate.
The sellers and the marketplaces can spend more time on their LLMs because it's their livelihood. It's the same asymmetry with different tooling.
"We are going to put online shopping on the blockchain and eliminate gatekeepers and fraud"
Who mentioned blockchain? You just need to allow e-commerce website to expose their storefront as a MCP app or UI and then clients can interact with them directly.
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.
> The Chinese models are open source because they are not state of the art
I think geohot is burying the lead in this text in his post with a lot of speculation.
It's not not that these specific models will become closed it's that the hardware/hosting vendors have an incentive to train models where inference is custom tuned to their chip's dimensions and VRAM.
The Chinese models do a great job of showing what's capable on consumer/prosumer hardware because of export restrictions but anyone entering the hardware space has the same incentives to undercut the frontier labs so they can sell more hardware.
It's also not clear if being at the forefront of inference quality really matters. The open source models appear to be doing a fine enough job of keeping up even if they're a few months behind. So it seems like there's not much of a technology moat for these labs other than the capital costs of training/serving.
To be fair, the author does explicitly state that their blog is:
> A home for poorly researched ideas that I find myself repeating a lot anyway
> the "rent-seeking class" that has effectively existed for thousands of years
This "rent seeking class" is not a historical universal, regardless of how much college marxists insist that it is. Leaders can be good or bad, and they hold power in different ways. In America today we have bad leaders (across the entirety of the political spectrum) - and AI poses a lot of challenges in how they hold power. This is not to say Chinese leaders are any better - but the way they hold power is not challenged by AI. Business models will indeed adapt - but the condition is excellent, as they say.
I think self driving cars are important for a couple of reasons:
1. Demographics - Aging population needs transportation. God knows we certainly don't need really old people driving themselves. We got a taste of the future in West Portal in that regard not long ago.
2. Human Capital - The US has pretty much demonstrated that there is little desire to import low skilled labor. Where do these theoretical Taxi drivers come from? Or welders or plumbers. Labor is going to become increasing expensive no matter how you slice the pie.
3. Younger US citizens are going to gravitate to non-manual labor jobs. It is not just that every one is being steered toward college. Physical labor (trades) take a toll on the body. I know - I have work in them - and you quickly extrapolate what that will be like when you are 50.
Public transportation solved this before cars were commonplace. Implement ubiquitous and free public transportation in every urban center (where 80% of the American population lives [0]) and you'll save billions from not having to manufacture (and store!) cars.
0: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g...
For public transportation to be broadly appealing it has to be clean, safe, and fast. Which means that you have to prevent people who are antisocial (playing loud music, etc.), violent, or just have terrible hygiene from boarding. You can't expect the bus driver to double-task as a security guard, so you have to somehow figure out a different way to implement security enforcement on the vehicles. You also may have to be ruthless in optimizing overall transportation value, of which speed is a factor, which may mean cutting some stops.
You have to have the political will and support to do all this even as the almost inevitable controversial videos hit social media: people being manhandled by security guards while protesting their innocence, people complaining about how there used to be a stop on their street but now it's gone, etc.
Let's not gloss over the electrical supply. These chips won't work for free.
LLM inference uses on the order of 1 Wh per query. That's under 10 meters of driving on an EV or running air conditioning for under 5 seconds.
https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/ai-footprint-august-202...
One query is not going to be a useful benchmark when people are deploying AI swarms in loops to solve simple problems
Or a human riding a stationary bike for 36 seconds.
>Third party marketplaces sprung up for reservations, and idk it’s been a while since I went to fancy dinner, but I imagine the restaurants have just started charging. Or at least the first party reservation sites do.
Yes, this is what Tock is for. It's not clear to me that it's a bad thing. It replaces the old $20 in a handshake I used to do with the maitre d at the front of the restaurant. Democratizes opportunity and improves transparency
> 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.
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.
Since the article is largely about open weights models, I think the argument is that this is the "last gasp" and soon doing inference at home will be common.
The trend over the last decades was towards more centralization and I don't see that changing. Unless we radically change our economic system, the rent seekers will always win. There will be probably less of them but they will be even bigger.
The small models that I can run at home are becoming more capable, and I have replaced some API-based tasks with local inference as they improve, but large open weights models are still a lot stronger. The nice thing with larger open weights models is that competing providers serve them at modest margins and prices. I don't have the hardware to run the largest Qwen models, but I can get API access at low cost. Since there are only modest barriers to new commercial inference providers for these models I'm not worried that API access to them will become drastically more expensive at some future time.
And since there are only modest barriers to new commercial inference providers for these models...
Congress: "Hold my beer and watch this"
Running on what devices (and additionally, purchased with what money)?
Betteridge's Law of Headlines hard here.
> The era of purposefully frustrating humans is over. The Chinese open source model running on the box under my desk can pass the Turing Test. When you call, e-mail, text, or show me an ad, you’ll never know if it’s me or my model seeing it.
But at some point, you're going to want to do something, like, e.g., buy something. Then you're right back to the problem in the opening quote:
> 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.
& we're already seeing AI used to do this. E.g., Amazon listings where product photos are AI generated. (… not that many product photos weren't "bad photoshop of product onto hot sexy model who is obviously not using our product" before … but now it's AI!) Whereas before someone would have had to spend a modicum of time badly using Photoshop, now AI can just churn out the same fraudulent result in a fraction of the time.
Now, if I have a problem with a product, instead of just calling a number, browsing a phone tree, getting put on hold, and finally having to struggle to get some human to understand the basic logistics of "I paid for X, I did not get X, I demand X or refund", I get to do all that but with the extra step of "forced engagement with an AI that is incapable of actually solving my problem". (This somehow still manages to apply even when the problem is seemingly trivial enough that I find myself thinking "… this actually should be something an AI can do" but inevitably, no, the AI is "sorry", it cannot do that.)
And besides, calls, emails, etc. are already handled without AI: I (and everyone I really care about) have either allowlisted all inbound comms, or abandoned the medium altogether. Moreover, any communications medium is useful because it is not infested with spam, and will eventually be destroyed by spam. At least until we grow laws for mediums like phone/email, maybe named things like "Do Not Call" or "CAN-SPAM" and those laws are enforced. But the GOP has no interest in enforcing any level of consumer protection, so here we are.
> 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.
Right.
You'll just end up paying the 15-20% cut to the people who train the model and keep it updated and run the agents that you rent from them.
> 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.
you do pay for their time, when you (or someone else) buys the company's products. but customer support exists because it makes the company money, so really they should be paying you
Again, while this is a popular and widely desired price structure, it works only because the annoying customers who generate bad customer support tickets are constrained by human friction. If Bonzo who doesn't know what he's doing starts generating 10 pages a day of plausible LLM slop demanding a response, you can't tuck the cost of handling that behind a standard product price. Enterprise-facing businesses will have to be more aggressive about rejecting or overcharging customers who are insufficiently sophisticated; consumer-facing businesses will be pushed towards the Gmail route of just not offering meaningful customer support at all.
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.
Local veterinary, dentists, medical practices, funeral home, retirement homes, roofing, HVAC, etc are being bought by private equity and wealth extracted.
When every financial transaction I make in part goes to a layer at the top that exists solely because they leveraged some digit in a balance book it is techno feudalism with an owning class being paid because they are the owning class, only instead of the baron always getting his cut it's invisible someones with even less accountability than the local feudal baron had.
I find it amusing and, IDK, charming how “rent-seeking” has become a general purpose pejorative, like “bourgeoisie” was at one time.
More like "rent-seeking" has become a general purpose business strategy
Instead of selling products companies want recurring revenue from subscription. That's rent seeking. And look how commonplace it is now
> 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.
>Not to mention the added bonus of the collapse of the US economy. Frankly, it’s well deserved. Nobody should build an economy based on rent seeking and increasing friction. I pray the collapse will be swift and legible so that reconstruction (in the right way) can begin as soon as possible.
Insane take for a bunch of reasons, the destruction of the US economy would necessarily entail the destruction of the world economy. Hopefully I don't have to explain why that would be bad. Furthermore, a ton of the "rent seeking" Citrini Research was discussing isn't traditional rent seeking but the cognitive services previously necessary. Software engineering, for instance, falls into that bucket.
I don't understand how you can look at LLMs and how you think they will result in less time wasting bureocracy? Sure the users can use LLMs to talk to call centers, but businesses will absolutely block the sun with the amount of LLMs they'll throw back at you, try to literally do anything on the phone, it's starting to be all LLMs.
In an LLM arms race, corporations will win bud, sorry.
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).
Not really. It's undeniable that technology reset power structures, but ultimately it just ended up with new power structures/new people made the gatekeepers.
Just look at the people whose success was broken by Youtube overnight. Youtube/BigTech won over Hollywood, not the people 100% beholden to Youtube. Under Hollywood people still got their residuals. Under Youtube, next day you can be cut off completely.
Power structures still exist for sure. But objectively, there are tens of thousands currently making a living from YouTube who would've never been able to become entertainers if Hollywood was the only game in town.
The barriers to entry for entertainers have never been so low.
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"
It's going to be the same asymmetry with different tooling. Why does he think people will be the only ones with these tools? Companies will utilize them, as they already are, and will also have more time to fine-tune, manage, and improve them.
It's going to be your bots vs theirs. Theirs will have more resources. Net result? probably fewer jobs and wealthier companies yet again.
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...
> This argument is a bit scattered. "Rent seeking" is being misused here.
It's being used in a more literal-meanings-of-the-words sense ("pursuing monopoly rents") rather than the narrow economic term-of-art sense of "pursuing monopoly rents through influence over public policy by means that do not create, or which inhibit the creation of, additional wealth" (the definition you seem to be complaining about it not adhering to without actually providing.)
But most of the usages would also be correct in the narrower sense, because virtually ever actor referred to as rent-seeking in the broader sense are also rent-seeking in the narrow sense as part of that. (E.g., actively lobbying for "safety" regulation which would disproportionately impair non-incumbent new competitors.)
> What the author is talking about isn't rent-seeking per se but a moat.
Pursuing a moat is just another term for seeking monopoly rents by any means, including rent-seeking in the narrow sense.
(There's also obviously an ideological angle in creating the term "rent seeking" as a term of criticism to those seeking monopoly rents through means that the creators of the term disapprove of, excluding seeking the same kind of rents by other means from "rent seeking".)
No, a moat is a competitive advantage/ OpenAI in particular is predicated on the belief that they will have a compeitive advantage. ASML is a compeitive advantage with EUV (for now). You can overcharge for if you have a compeititve advantage but that's not the same as rent-seeking.
Rent-seeking is fundamentally intermediation like a health insurer putting themselves between a patient and a healthcare provider or privatizing grazing lands or controlling water supplies from snowmelt (like the Resnicks) or privatizing trains in the UK.
Microsoft has a compeitive advantage with Windows, Google with its search engine and the ad business that funds it, Amazon with AWS or NVidia with GPUs. There are alternatives to all of these things but these companies maintain dominance with a combination of scale, cost, technology and network effects. That's not rent-seeking in a broad or narrow sense.
Rent-seeking would be Microsoft lobbying lawmakers to require schools and governments to purchase Windows, for example.
> No, a moat is a competitive advantage
No, a moat is a barrier to people closing the gap of an existing competitive advantage. The barrier is literally the point of the metaphor. If there is no barrier, there is no moat, just a transitory advantage; that's the whole basis of the famous "we have no moat and neither does OpenAI" memo at Google; its not that the big established players had (at that time, or now) no current competitive advantage over open source competition, its that there was no structual barrier preserving it.
> Rent-seeking is fundamentally intermediation
No, rent-seeking is using influence over public policy as a means to extracting monopoly rents. State policy favoring intermediation is one manner of rent seeking, yes.
> Rent-seeking would be Microsoft lobbying lawmakers to require schools and governments to purchase Windows, for example.
That is an example, but lobbying for specific mandates for purchases from the specific firm is a fairly extreme case of rent-seeking, not the general case; a more common for of rent-seeking is firms in a narrow group of leading incumbents lobbying for various standards (either for public market access or government contracts) to be set for the industry that are not a particular burden for existing large firms to meet but which create additional friction for new competitors. In the specific case of software, this can include lobbying for rules that specifically treat open source solutions as suspect and dangerous, as well.
> If there is no barrier, there is no moat, just a transitory advantage
A moat can very much be transitory and caused by natural (or at least, not specifically intended) factors. Perhaps we could then call it something different, like a river as opposed to a moat, but the strategic effect is the same either way so it makes sense to use the established term for it.
> 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.
> 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.
I don't totally buy OP's argument, but I think you're dismissing it unfairly.
His point is that in the pre-LLM world, if a company wants to waste your time, they can hire a call center employee overseas for US$4/hr and make you wait for an hour to talk to them for 30 minutes. If you value your time at $80/hr, then the 90-minute call cost you $120, but it only cost the company about $2, thus the asymmetry.
OP's claim is that now, the asymmetry is gone. If both you and the company try to use AI, the company has less leverage to impose costs on you. They can deploy more AI to waste more of your time, but that means the asymmetry now is in the customer's favor because it costs the company more than the customer to get support.
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.
>The best anyone can hope for is a free market, with everything properly priced
This is an oxymoron.
"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.
A society/country that produces functionally illiterate adults should be regarded as a mistake.
At some point you were part of that group that you are labeling a mistake. At another point, your children are or will be if you have any. Locking all of these productivity tools in one generation is a recipe for failure. You should think outside the box that you are currently trapped in.
nope, I learned how to compute on the DOS command line
Same here. It's been a while.
DOS still works
Yes it does. So does my old HP-11C calculator I used to write the first programs, in RPN for oil well log analysis, that I ever wrote outside of a class assignment.
All of those routines were reprogrammed originally in a flavor of BASIC and it soon became obvious that ASCII log displays from digitized published materials were marginally useful as interpretation tools. Tabular data was far too dense. We needed pictures. Therefore we chased graphical methods of displaying data leading us to C and then C++ for the graphical routines that made it easy to display all of the data from an oil well log and to scroll the logs while zooming in and out.
We started all that in some flavor of DOS and as time went by and everyone dumped their latest OS incarnation, we moved thru MS-DOS, PC-DOS, DR-DOS, etc until MS finally got with the GUI environment plan like Apple's Mac and produced a near worthless GUI called Win386 and later Win95. For a time it was fun.
Linux, the old new kid on the block, still works great from the command line too. The GUI exists to streamline some of the things that are more easily digested in graphical formats. It has nothing to do with anyone's intelligence or ability to pick up skills they don't have today.