The tech sector of the economy has a structurally disproportionate amount of influence over the world. A key reason is that the number of people working in tech stays relatively low even as the number of people that their product reaches skyrockets. Take Discord: they have a few thousand employees and hundreds of millions of users. Contrast this with a business like a grocery store, where the amount of work goes up fairly steadily with the number of customers and the amount of stuff that they buy, or a lawyer’s office, where the amount of money coming in is tied to the amount of billable hours worked by specific attorneys and their staff.

The reason that so many businesses want to invest in AI is the potential of pushing this dynamic even further. A traditional law firm can only take on so many cases before needing to hire more attorneys; in contrast, the theoretical AI equivalent could serve tons of people with a few prompt engineers and the AI agents that they delegate the lawyerin’ to.

This brings up the strong distinction that exists in any business between the people who do the work and the people who capture the value (i.e. monetize things.) For example, at my last apartment, the guy who I paid rent to was completely separate from the guy who came in and painted the walls, put in new appliances, and got each unit ready after someone moved out. The maintenance guy would introduce himself as “the one doing all the work around here,” but my landlord was the one capturing the value.

In the case of AI, the work being monetized is, well, everyone’s; the number of researchers and engineers working on ChatGPT is tiny compared to the number of people whose output is included in its training data. The lawyers, writers, and bloggers of the world did a lot of work that was then scraped and fed into a whole new monetization model by tech people once optimizing ads got boring. The free-floating value of the modern information ecosystem was captured by a few random guys with GPUs.

There are definitely situations where there are huge benefits to businesses being able to serve tons of people with relatively low marginal costs. Discord’s ability to serve so many people with relatively few employees is why their product can be free for the vast majority of people who use it; similarly, for most of us, the idea of getting lawyerin’ done without needing to pay large amounts of money to a real human attorney is probably pretty appealing. The unsettling part is when the labor of the many is being turned into money by the few, and the people capturing the value are clearly not the people who created it; it’s all the lawyers filing briefs without realizing they’re training their (theoretical) replacements.