The AI-Rich and the AI-Poor

The two social classes of the incoming AI Reformation

I. Misreading AI’s state of affairs

Sources of the images: here, here, here (left to right, top to bottom)

Artist Reid Southen, popular on X for his relentless criticism of generative AI on behalf of anti-AI artists, captioned the above collage with a dooming message:

Guys, they’re desperate. AI companies are starting to hike prices to offset their losses. Traditionally, this is only done after you’ve cornered the market. They’re so cooked.

His reading comes across as a reasonable one for three reasons.

• The generative AI market isn’t yet mature. Startups remain immersed in fierce competition for funding, talent, and pioneer-minded clients. They fight to sell tokens (i.e. generated words) at a lower cost, pushing prices monotonously down, which doesn’t benefit them except as a form of dunk-based public relations.
• Companies enjoy no tangible moat — coming-and-going employees control the knowledge supply and Nvidia monopolistically controls the hardware supply — except being the protegee of a tech giant. But that’s no differentiator when most startups are backed by either Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, Amazon, Apple, or some venture capital firm — sometimes several of them at once.
• There’s no monopoly on the…