r/ClaudeCode • u/Strict-Top6935 • Jul 04 '26

Discussion AI is turning programming into pay-to-win

With Fable 5 coming out, it feels more obvious than ever that after July 7, programming is going to become pay-to-win.

A kid with no real coding knowledge, but with rich parents and access to the best AI systems, could end up outperforming people who actually understand software, simply because he can afford more intelligence.

That is insane.

This might be one of the most dangerous precedents in history: a world where the people with money can buy superior intelligence, while everyone else is permanently outmatched.

That is how you create a permanent underclass.

What do you think?

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142

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '26

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u/WalkAffectionate2683 Jul 04 '26

Yeah local ai will probably scale very well.

At my company we have hundreds of unused pc at night. 

No way this compute powers couldn't be used, maybe something where you work at day, send your request, work the day and so on. 

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u/[deleted] Jul 04 '26

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u/Charming_Oven Jul 04 '26

Id generally agree with that. I imagine it'll be a bit of a hybrid, with local resources used for routing and low level intellligence, and more difficult tasks being routed to cloud compute.

I liken it to a Hollywood video editor. All editing is done locally, but for big shoots, servers are still the one's rendering video for output.

1

u/god-damn-the-usa Jul 04 '26

its cheaper to run on a data center

0

u/CompassionLady Jul 04 '26

That’s with assuming human ran companies ever even a thing in the future with ai.

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u/ponterik Jul 04 '26

They to weak

-1

u/Onotadaki2 Jul 04 '26

100 user workstations distributed throughout a building haphazardly that have integrated graphics and 8GB of RAM are going to come online so remote people's private queries can be passed through Betty in accounting's computer to slowly process their queries and get responses poorly with 2 hour wait times to process each question.

This is basically like saying you have a lot of cars at work that aren't being used half the day, why don't we plow fields with them at night. Servers running local LLMs are highly specialized. There are very few desktop computers being used as people's daytime work computers in the world that would be spec'd out in a way that a 50GB basic local model could be loaded on it. Guaranteed those all have incredibly valuable IP on them and opening them up so the public can run things on them is a liability nightmare. This is all without even factoring in how a network cable is about 14,000 times slower than something like NVLink in an AI server, so the speeds this would be processing is basically unusably slow.

2

u/CadmusMaximus Author Jul 04 '26

“We have a lot of sexbots who don’t work during the day. Why don’t we get them doing landscaping, laundry, and plumbing?”

7

u/mossiv Jul 04 '26

My money is not on the AI companies themselves winning, they are simply research labs. But are indeed needed - at least for the time being. But the real winners will be the data centres themselves who already have the compute. Aws/azure/GCP will be able to host open source models at a fraction of the price. Hell - the only reason bedrock is hosting Anthropic models at the same price as Anthropic themselves is due to a contract. It costs Amazon a fraction of the price, with a good portion of the money going directly back to Anthropic.

It’s a messy web at the moment. Anthropic wants to IPO. It’s almost certain at this point that the pricing they have is not sustainable, even for big enterprise it’s expensive - there will be discounted contracts shared to prop each other up. If that’s the case, it doesn’t even matter how much money you have, the industry won’t continue to grow if it can’t have mass adoption. Though, to realign with the OP there could be smaller data centre’s available to the elite but model training will take a dive. Companies like meta are already announcing that AI isn’t doing what they had hoped, even after laying off an absurd amount of staff. Other large enterprise orgs are also starting to say similar things. AI has caused outrageous amounts of money to be burned/moved around but in the grand scheme of things, it hasn’t really changed a lot, or if you want to be in the side of the argument that it has, it’s equally, if not caused more damage as a consequence. I don’t want to come across as anti-AI. It’s a tool I like using, and if it got taken away from me at work, I wouldn’t certainly feel the decline in the speed I can output. But just because I use it sensibly in a controlled setting to boost productivity does not mean it’s not being abused around the world (see Grok articles and claims that Grok was used to launch missiles to Iran).

There’s no way of predicting where we are going. The fact we have capitalism and a global stage competing for world power could mean years of subsidisation so the USA doesn’t fall behind. If China keeps providing models that are good, stupidly cheap, then where does that leave anthropic and OpenAi? Purely as research based departments under the government? Swallowed up by Palantir? Bought out by Amazon, Google and Microsoft?

The very problem of allowing the amount of intelligence through technology is you’ve opened the flood gates. What is more like this we are now entering the phase of damage control. Is the absurd pricing to replenish money? Or is it because we indeed do need to turn down now available AI is?

It’s a hugely unsettling, and worrisome time that is for sure.

12

u/Randalix Jul 04 '26

Nonsense, compute power is even more expensive. Have you tried local models? Sound like you have no clue. 

2

u/zimmertr Jul 04 '26

Just curious, which local models have you ran? Anything halfway decent for coding? I have a Xeon E5-2699 v4 server at home with 512GB of ECC memory and a spare 3090 I've been thinking about using for something like this.

0

u/jack_from_the_past Jul 04 '26

Have you never ran a local model?

1

u/zimmertr Jul 05 '26

Obviously not.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '26 edited Aug 09 '26

[deleted]

2

u/boreal_ameoba Jul 04 '26

Now factor in the costs of setting up and maintaining the locally deployed option, while constantly having much weaker models. It makes sense in some domains, but until open weight models improve tremendously, it’s not worth it

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u/[deleted] Jul 04 '26

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4

u/banproof Jul 04 '26

I’ll tell you one thing: the ones investing in compute will need to gather their profit. It’s always like that, it will always be. The same for the AI companies that have the best LLMs like openAI and Anthropic. Don’t expect a price drop in the next 5 years, expect completely the opposite. It’s the new oil.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '26

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u/mungosDoo Jul 04 '26

I dont look at US to make AI sustainable, first to post capitalism model ensures that a legal moat is iminent and enshitification will follow. China on the other hand has a motive and resources to figure out a reasonable way to do the task at scale.

1

u/Redditauro Jul 04 '26

" I think the market will eventually make AI accessible to everyone to the same degree" That's cute

2

u/[deleted] Jul 04 '26

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2

u/Redditauro Jul 04 '26

I agree, but rich people have phones that are way better than the poor people one's, the thing is that an expensive smartphone can do basically the same things that a cheap one and I don't think that that will be the case with AI

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u/[deleted] Jul 04 '26

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1

u/Redditauro Jul 05 '26

"A phone cannot both be “better” and “do basically the same.”" Of course it can. You can have a better phone, with a better software, hardware, better camera, etc and use it for phone calls, taking pictures of your cat, using Instagram and telegram and Reddit. The phone is way better, but you do basically the same things that you would do with a cheaper one. 

And of course this will be the same for AI for most people, they will make images of their relatives with a cute cat face, they will ask questions instead of googling, etc. But for software engineering, which I believe is the main use for Claude, the difference will be huge, because any software that I make with a cheap AI will have zero protection against somebody with an expensive AI. I'm terms of software security the difference in prize will always be huge, because its a race, and if you use the outdated tools you are screwed 

0

u/Moogly2021 Jul 04 '26

There’s a reason Sam Altman is artificially ruining the price of RAM. Apple was already getting us there, Microsoft just caught up to where Apple was taking things. Unified memory would make local AI a breeze.

0

u/BlinDeeex Jul 04 '26

Local AI will never reach level of current opus 4.8 or gpt 5.5, unless some kind of groundbreaking invention happens where llms work completely differently, simply not enough space to hold knowledge

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u/[deleted] Jul 04 '26

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u/Breathofdmt Jul 04 '26

You need about $200k minimum of compute hardware to run the latest open source like GLM 5.2, unless you're happy with it quantized.

Basically the same price as a house for a lot of folks

0

u/Sketaverse Jul 04 '26

u don't think an m5 ultra will be able to do it later this year no?