If 1B people consume via personally or their employer on average $100/mo of tokens or services that solves the problem right there and that is not inconceivable whatsoever and feels like an underestimate. Repayment doesn’t imply you have to build an end to end replacement of an industry.
This also negates this whole like “you have to completely replace a human” fallacy. Why do you need to replace a human? Why not just increase the value each human brings you?
The model of open weights has been around for awhile. You have frontier labs releasing them. They are powerful and capable and track yet lag frontier models. Without massive government subsidies from probably China who did something similar with manufacturing I don’t get the idea of OSS somehow toppling the entire industry of frontier models. How would this happen? Did demand for frontier models drop after GPT-4? GPT-5? Because the cost of GPT-4 perf is maybe 100x cheaper today. You can always pay a premium for a better model (more data spend with proprietary data sources, more compute for training, more thinking budgets), and in the end, things will either go to a monopoly or prices will stabilize around the marginal costs.
Also safeguards are always important. They are thorny fundamental horrific problems and I can tell you there will be a hellscape of pain as people figure out the trivial ways to do bad things with some of the worst security practices we’ve seen. But I don’t get why this is a dealbreaker, we are using these systems everywhere and in loads bearing environments, today, and reliability and hallucination rates continue to increase / decrease.
>If 1B people consume via personally or their employer on average $100/mo of tokens or services that solves the problem right there
0.15B is the full actively employed population of the US. 0.2 extra for the full EU, and we're barely making a third of the needed numbers, and this is assuming that the guy cleaning the street or the plumber will have a 100 bucks subscription just because - not to mention that a hundred bucks is 10-20% of median monthly income in many countries, even some EU ones.
You're asking for 3x Netflix subscribers at 4-10x Netflix price and with the whole world standardized at American prices (without American income).
Then add that this would very likely be a commodity market with competitors, so the billion, if existing, would be a market rather than a specific company's income.