Say I’m a company with 1000 employees. A company like anthropic is offering to replace each employee with some sort of agent. Suppose the agents cost roughly $80k, where an employee costs $100k. I take that deal because it saves real money and replace, say, 500 employees with agents.
Now let’s assume just for the sake of argument that these AI agents do exactly as promised and truly do replace those workers and all of their responsibilities. Things seem great, I decreased my costs a lot and my business is buzzing along.
Now anthropic comes to me and says they’re going to increase their prices to $100k/agent. What now?
Since you’re trading individual employees for a company that’s providing the service at a cost, it’s effectively like these agents are unionized, in a way. They ask for a raise and you don’t comply? Okay fine. No work for you. Nothing you can say or do will get these agents back
Not only that, anthropic can leverage the absolutely insane amount of data they have to squeeze you for everything you’re worth. They probably have actuaries on staff who can figure out the maximum possible amount they can charge you before you leave.
Going to a competitor is easier said than done. There’s a lot of underlying infrastructure with AI that needs to be changed and adjusted to make it work. Each model has its own strengths and weaknesses. So maybe, you go to a competitor and it’s back to 80k/year, but now, code has a 10% higher error rate and you start losing money
idk. it just seems like this desire to get rid of labor entirely can only backfire. This is one way, but there are so many others too.
Duplicated from source: https://www.reddit.com/r/trueantiAI/comments/1wj748w/wouldnt_using_replacing_employees_with_ai/
Yup.
For one thing, LLMs can’t replace employees. Not really. Some who have tried (like Uber) have regretted it. (Others have fallen hopelessly into AI psychosis.)
I think there have been several companies that have decided to lay off a bunch of people and used the lie “we replaced them with AI” to spin it in a way that makes their stockholders happy. In fact that might be the majority of companies who are reporting that they’re replacing employees with AI.
But there are definitely other companies that have simply drunk the Kool-Aid as well.
Price increases is definitely gonna happen, actually. And not just because all the “AI” companies are greedy bastards. All the LLM offerings out there are running at massive losses. They’re trying to get people/clients hooked so they can way increase prices. And they’d have to increase prices a lot to make it actually profitable for them.
That’s putting it a little generously for my taste, but yeah.