I don't think that AI companies can charge the same. The human workforce can charge these costs, because of scarcity. But AI systems won't be scarce, it's just a matter of who can run inference cheapest. Plus you still have the human workforce, which might be forced to offer their time for less money.
What do you mean? The sum of ALL US salaries is $13.4 Trillion per year. According to google $65T is the sum of ALL salaries Globally (not just knowledge workers). It's not reasonable to assume AI is a drop-in-replacement for any job yet (perhaps bottom tier customer support from oversees?).
> So if their hypothetical revenues are double-digit trillions and valuations are some multiple of that
So you're sort of premising here than more than 16% or 1/6 of all the world's jobs get replaced by AI. Hopefully you can understand that's both not the current AI capability and also would be a terrible (unprecedented?) economic shock.
Unfortunately, I do fear that AI adoption will go beyond augmentation to automation, and I do fear an economic shock. Just posted this down-thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49722616
And then there’s the second order effect: if all the knowledge workers get automated, who is going to buy the stuff that’s produced?
Take the Hugging Face incident. Why did it happen? Because the people whose task was to set up a testing framework took shortcuts. Why did they? Because there weren't enough people who were assigned to do the job. Why not? Because the job is too new and not enough people are qualified to do it. It's a job that simply did not exist 3 years ago. But 3 years from now, this job might very well employ tens of thousands of high skill knowledge workers.
Unfortunately, I fear that may not be the most likely outcome. I've posted some comments on this before, but when I start thinking about how deeply everything will change once people figure out how to properly leverage AI, I see no outcome other than significant, widespread job losses.
As you indicated, at that point we will have much a bigger problem than the valuation of the AI industry. I'm not sure how it will get solved, I just know it will HAVE to be, because it would be an existential problem for everybody: people, governments, even the billionaires! Because now consider the 3rd order effects: if nobody can buy the stuff that's produced, how can billionaires get even richer? ;-)
Future supply and demand will set the price - not what is paid today. If supply by open models is vast and cheap, I can't see that the entire knowledge industry can hold the current size. It'll rather collapse to a fraction of its current value.