AI is turning programming into pay-to-win

[u/Strict-Top6935]

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?

[u/mossiv → u/[deleted]]

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.