Technology

There has always been one exciting rupture moment for me. LLM companies offer their product at a loss to try to capture market share using investor capital/loans. Companies using those LLMs do so because it's currently cheaper than hiring humans. The losses from this are hidden from investors through the circular economy which is funded by speculative investment. At some point the LLM companies will need to enshittify their product for the same reason their customers are. They can charge whatever they want for the software their customers are dependent on and they'll need to milk those pigs dry. However, I've always just kind of assumed that they'd be charging what it costs to produce slop and an arbitrary profit margin.

It didn't even occur to me that they'd do this with tokens too. You can't trust that your perfectly reliable employee is generating anything with the compute time you're suddenly being gouged for. If you buy another LLM to audit the progress of the first, you can't trust their business model isn't also mining bitcoin while pretending to hallucinate about the half-generated hallucinations of the first bot. If you desperately try to restructure your entire business with a new LLM ecosystem, it's made and sold and reviewed by LLMs that are increasingly incentivised to burn tokens doing cheaper computing than they say they are. The tech sector and computer science are already experiencing a labour collapse, anyone coming out of universities now is poisoned by LLMs or competed with students who got better grades using LLMs, any child going into universities has increasingly never existed in a world without them. There won't be anyone literate enough to parse the mountain of slop that you otherwise have to trust because it's too long for you to read yourself, just more predatory bots on a dead internet.

Hapsburg AI is going to be so much more interesting than just the first-wave incest. We're getting the full lazy aristocracy experience that destroys Cyber-Austro-Hungary.