AI reduces the need for expensive labor, payroll taxes and health insurance premiums, yet the cost of the company's service keeps going up. How does that happen?

Are you trying to imply that humans don’t need generalized knowledge, or that we’re not “rewarded” for having highly generalized knowledge?

If so, good luck walking to your kitchen this morning, knowing how to breathe, etc.

Super useful exercise. My gut tells me that someone will soon figure out how to build micro-LLMs for specialized tasks that have real-world value, and then training LLMs won’t just be for billion dollar companies. Imagine, for example, a hyper-focused model for a specific programming framework (e.g. Laravel, Django, NextJS) trained only on open-source repositories and documentation and carefully optimized with a specialized harness for one task only: writing code for that framework (perhaps in tandem with a commodity frontier model). Could a single programmer or a small team on a household budget afford to train a model that works better/faster than OpenAI/Anthropic/DeepSeek for specialized tasks? My gut tells me this is possible; and I have a feeling that this will become mainstream, and then custom model training becomes the new “software development”.

I have a theory that the renaissance and perhaps more critically the industrial revolution that followed was in a large part driven by coffee.

Middle ages, things are a bit sleepy, dopey. Everybody is drinking beer all the time. progress runs at a slow pace.

Then there is this popular new tea sweeping the scene and boy howdy does it get you up and going. Now people are waking up and doing things.

Caffeine, It's a hell of a drug.

Thats a classic claude move, even the new sonnet 4.6 still does this.

It really is a prosthetic for minds that struggle to organize themselves.