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Ten median US software developers cost about $1.5 - $1.7 million per year - including all benefits - as of a couple of years ago.

A frontier AI is at least as capable as ten median human software developers. It's likely well beyond that now. Over the course of a year, would you have to spend $1.5 million to get the output of those ten median humans? No chance in hell. You'd have to spend less than 10% of that.

Then on top of that: the AI is improving rapidly; the humans go on vacation, the humans decline, the humans get old, the humans get sick, the humans take parental leave, the human struggle to adapt, the humans are resistant to change, the humans riot, the humans protest, the humans need healthcare, the humans want paid more, the humans can only work for 4-6 hours at peak while writing software (slowly).

Do you know any humans that are experts at a dozen programming languages? That human does not exist. The frontier AI are omnimaths.

by zeroonetwothree1 days ago|

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> the humans are resistant to change, the humans riot, the humans protest

This is partially a feature. Conflict and disagreement tends to produce better decisions in the end.

by 0c3ca831 days ago|

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And this counts the training and data center construction?

by adventured1 days ago|

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What's my cost as a business to utilize the latest cutting edge Chinese model, renting its usage from the cloud? Whatever the Chinese cost (on their side), I'm never going to suffer even a tiny fraction of that pass-along cost no matter what. We can all appreciate the subsidization going on.

Or to grab a bunch of $200 per month accounts from OpenAI or Anthropic for a team to use?

The calculations is: I'm in the US, if I have ten median software developers, what's my cost? Then versus using AI instead.

The human labor can't keep up. Even if we freeze things right here, and then hyper optimize Fable 5.2 by etching it straight to silicon, the human developers are obsolete. And the future isn't going to stop coming.

by komali21 days ago|

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I like their angle though - from a societal perspective of allocated resources, how long until we've paid off the cost of building these LLMs? Imagine instead the entire supply chain was Stalinistically tuned towards finding bugs in Linux. Training rare earth mineral miners how to code level or whatever. I think as a thought experiment it's interesting, the answers could translate to an organizational level about comparing labor cost against token cost. What's a good breakdown of token spend vs hiring some new juniors to train up?