The only way for "Big AI" to become a thing is for them to establish a moat, and right now the only path to that appears to be achieving regulatory capture in the US, which is a fickle and unstable state of affairs.

> Big AI essen­tially uses its tech customers as an R&D facility. Big AI licenses models to these compa­nies. Tech compa­nies compete to adapt their busi­nesses to AI. Once a concept is proven, Big AI directly takes over that market. The labor-replace­ment story will grow into a company-replace­ment story.

It's not obvious that there will be a single AI and that it will by definition concentrate power.

At a certain point - intelligence doesn't matter. Unless we're literally headed toward 1984 / matrix at which point it doesn't matter.

My guess is the argument for what we're doing is counterintuitively the opposite of what he's making.

Unless we go hard at the market - now - an authoritarian state actor who is willing to use the technology to fully silence and kill critics will win.

And boy, do they desperately, desperately want to win.

> Consider large law firms, aka Big Law. Currently certain legal-AI star­tups license LLMs from Big AI and repackage them for Big Law at high prices. These star­tups claim to add other special sauce. OK, sure. Where’s the economic equi­lib­rium? If legal-AI star­tups prove that money can be made selling AI to Big Law—won’t Big AI just sell to Big Law directly, and cut out the star­tups? Or if legal-AI star­tups prove that AI can effec­tively provide legal services—won’t legal-AI star­tups just sell to clients directly, and cut out Big Law? Won’t members of Big Law that adopt AI have to lay off a lot of equity part­ners, because adop­tion of AI will shrink profit margins?

…

> Along these lines, I expect that to succeed finan­cially, Big AI will likely need to demolish a signif­i­cant number of existing tech compa­nies and grab their revenue for itself.

Nobody knows how this will play out. Maybe the legal-AI startups win because they know their market better? They can switch to cheaper providers.

I had a much longer post here initially. Deleted it because I got tired of mental gymnastics required to follow the author's thought process. Instead, here are the salient parts of my response:

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The only way I can read the section on the mechanical tomato harvester is that they would rather have 32,000 people picking tomatoes than doing literally anything else. There are very good reasons that phone companies haven't employed people as switchboard operators for a nearly century. It isn't a valuable or useful way to spend a person's time.

As a young adult, I worked in a distribution center filling orders by picking products from a shelf and placing them in bins. It was incredibly boring but also physically demanding. Pick the correct number of items ordered, push the button. Pick the next number of items ordered for the next product, push the button. When the order is complete, start on the next bin. Repeat as fast as possible without making any mistakes.

It was SO draining to meet quota. After a few weeks, I didn't have to put any conscious effort in. Like driving a car, the process became automatic. I could think about other things while counting and pushing buttons. Thinking about things like how trivial this job would be to automate, so I didn't have to do this wasteful energy expenditure.

I quit that job after about 6 months, beginning my career in IT. But I gained a passionate hate for menial labor that can be automated with some upfront investment. I wouldn't want to pick tomatoes, either. The tomato harvesting machine is a miracle.

If this is the basis of calling technology inherently political, and using "inherently political" to cast a negative light on technology, then I have to call it out as hopelessly dystopian to not want "political technology". Namely fewer automated machines and more people doing menial labor.

Interesting if they pull it off, because clearly they did not have the logistics to pay the people whose IP they used to power the LLMs.

> For now, AI compa­nies largely agree on the first step: make workers depen­dent on AI to do their jobs, just as tech fore­bears made workers depen­dent on a certain soft­ware program to share a file, or on a certain website to have friends. This time, however, the soft­ware ulti­mately consumes the worker.

Any proposal about slowing down AI that doesn't put the onus on both the US and China is facetious.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-prepares-295-billi...

[1] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260609VL215/alibaba-ceo-ai...

I think capitalism in itself is great, what isn't is the fact that it can build on itself, it can be infinite, there's zero limits to it. Now what I mean by that, once you make 10k, it's easier to get to 100k and even easier to get to 1m and so on, you might think it's harder, but you gain access to more tools to make more money and at the 10m to 100m range you get to a point where it starts being genuinely hard to fail because just having your name on a project elevates the chances of success by a far margin. Of course there's plenty of people who managed to fail even with millions of dollars I will acknoledge that.

Let's take an extreme example: elon musk. Just having something done by "elon musk" makes the project known by nearly the entire world with investors at the doorstep ready to go, a pretty famous example of this would be hyper-loop, although the project itself is a complete failure, it effectively mobilized a decent chunk of companies into investing into this "modern form of transport".

People will argue that the solutions like wealth limits and higher taxes create complacency and stop people from achieving progress and pushing humanity forward, but I don't think that's quite true because at a certain point (beyond ~1m/month or even year in some cases like Linus Torvalds) is enough to effectively do 95% to 99% of what you could spend the money on, anything beyond that is pretty much infinite wealth due to the fact that you can get 5% returns nearly risk free.

There is this popular video of a businessman claiming that if they're taxed more that they will simply work less, but there's way more people that love their work and money is just a nice bonus. I think focusing your life around a number is a very unhealthy mindset and surfaces the worst parts of what we are as humans.

That said, money is a great motivator and probably the reason why we are here and the problems really only start to rear their ugly head when no one person can comprehend the money they have anymore. I don't have a solution, but I also believe that we need some kind of category beyond the "motivation" treshold where it stops being a motivator and instead becomes an aggressive fight with survival of the fittest.

https://mronline.org/2026/06/13/the-chimera-of-a-reformed-ca...