It's almost more of a warning to founders and VCs, that an AI developer that replaces a $100k/year developer might only get them $10k/year in revenue.

But that means that AI just generated a $90k consumer surplus, which on a societal level, is huge!

Not sure I quite get the point of the article. Sure, you won't capture $100k/year/dev. But if you capture $2k/year/dev, and you replace every dev in the world... that's the goal right?

They're saying expectations that AI revenues will equal HR expenditures, like you can take the funds from one column to the other, are wrong-headed. That makes sense to me.

I agree, but that doesn't have to be true for investors to be salivating, is my point.

I don't think the value stacks like that. Hiring 10 low level workers that you can pay 1/10th the salary to replace one higher level worker doesn't work.

Sure it does! Let me just hire 9 women for 1 month...

that $2k won't last long as you will never maintain a margin on a service like that

employee salaries are high because your competitors can't spawn 50000 into existence by pushing a button

competition in the industry will destroy its own margins, and then its own customer base very quickly

soon after followed by the economies of the countries they're present in

the whole thing is a capitalism self destruct button, for entire economies

> What the article is really about is the idea that all of the money that is now paid in wages will somehow be paid to AI companies as AI replaces humans.

Is anyone actually claiming this?

Not directly, but indirectly. It's what's leading to the FOMO w.r.t. investors. See the image in the parent blog post, where VCs are directly comparing the amount of money spent on AI at the moment (tiny) against the amount of money spent on headcount in various industries, with the implication being that "AI could be making all the money that was being spent on headcount, what an opportunity!"

The author claims so, but there don't seem to be any sources.

Given how the AI hype has been going though I wouldn't be at all surprised. And the article's following conclusions are also unsurprising (other than the bit where it claims AI can actually replace your software engineers)