I suppose if it all works out it'll end up way more expensive than the employees the models displaced ever were. These kinds of technologies usually end up as an oligopoly at best, and those players will have a wide moat by then, and the things these models build will be tweaked such that no other model or human being can realistically work on them anymore, and then they can price gouge everyone to the brink of unprofitability.
At least the models don’t need health insurance, office space, a cafeteria, or have a threat of unionizing.
The model provider would be like a union, at least if unions had absolute control over their members, could take them all away at any time forever with no substantial negative consequences to itself, and spend billions on employer lock-in so switching to the competition is worse than paying the 12% model salary raise.
Shh, that's the quiet part the investors don't want to say outloud.
Because they are not people or alive, you can literally torture them if it gives you a mild increase in performance. For all practical purposes you can't do that to living humans. What is the price to put on being able to do that? It might weight the scales a bit for some employers.
There's 10-15 labs near the frontier, and like 30 serious inference providers, over 70 total on OpenRouter.
With research and hardware near guaranteed to bring the efficiency way up, I'm not scared here of massive price hikes.
There is no moat.