Remember too that these models only really became useful less than a year ago with Opus 4.6 being an inflection point. It takes a long time for the economy to reorganize itself so it's not surprising we're not immediately seeing the payoff in economic data.
I can't imagine it can even feel productive to anyone, unless you use agents to automate re-rolling your slop machines, but then you're just going to end up with an unmaintainable ball of mud. Either way, it's definitely net negative.
Kind of same outcome as if you just generated lots and lots of random code (perhaps at AST level; but don't tell your Claude, that'd trick it into making itself obsolete tech!) and compiled it in parallel till it passed tests, but this time around, the computer also tells you that you hit the nail on its head, that you're totally right <s>and that you're such a good puppy. agent uses tool `clicker`</s>
Update your priors.
You know, what Microsoft has been trying with Palladium (can't risk general purpose computers! People might commit, oh the horror, copyright infringement, with those!)
Imho, as hardware keeps getting better, it seems to me this is the only thing that can make cloud investments worth it in the long term (which is only 2-3 years away) for hyperscalers. It's the only explanation. If OpenAI/SpaceX/Musk/... really thought AI would take over all jobs, they wouldn't be investing in compute, they'd be buying up farms, land, harbors, mines, bankrupt factories, fucking tax prep businesses ...
Make compute only possible within Goog/Amazon/Microsoft/... walled gardens ... that's the play. And this AI is a cute technology that conveniently needs lots of compute, but it's not even the actual core of the play. A very simple very old style monopoly grab, you know, the business plan people got convicted for trying in ancient Persia, 5000 years ago.
Unless prices get categorically higher, I don't think that's likely. Like 10x more than it is now.
Companies were buying computers for all their employees in the 90's, where a mediocre laptop could pretty easily cost two grand in 1990s money. My mom just bought a middle-of-the-road laptop for about a thousand dollars in today-money, and that was a consumer buying it; companies can generally spend more. "No choice but to use the cloud" feels like it's way too strong of a conclusion to draw.
Are you human? Then you must verify it from a "trusted computer", preferably with your driver's license. Gets governments and corporations as much information as they want, along with a guarantee that you can't "steal" their content and can't avoid their ads.
I have no doubt that Google and Microsoft will increasingly do things to force us to provide more data so they can do awful things to us.
Excuse my ignorance, do you have more details on this?
The Persian empire did not exist until round about 550 BCE.
Thus, the upthread statement,
> the business plan people got convicted for trying in ancient Persia, 5000 years ago.
Is somewhat nonsensical: 5000 years ago, Persia did not exist. I suppose we could be talking about whatever existed in that locale of the world around 3000 BCE. But that's what they're saying: "what do you mean, 'in ancient Persia, 5000 years ago', Persia did not exist then".
Prices are up a bit but there are plenty of "free-programmable computers" from a dozen or more manufacturers on the market. That's not going away.
I take your point that AI is pushing up the price of computers, at least temporarily, but you're leaning way into conspiracy and cynicism in your original post.
"AI" is really 2 companies, by extension funded/owned mostly by FANG, and is not pushing up the price of computers, it's buying ALL DDR5 capacity, processors, memory, and of course GPUs, including the fab capacity to build them in the first place. I don't know if you've recently tried to convince your boss recently to buy a new machine, but ...