I wouldn't say it's particularly brave, in fact LLMs are probably better at identifying mistakes than most tax payers. The % of Americans using a CPA to file taxes is fairly small.

Simply put, if you want frontier models at API prices, you can make up for that expense by hiring non-US talent. Many who have a good command of English and are willing to overlap US hours. There's plenty in LatAm alone. Whether or not that's a good choice for a business isn't relevant to the point I was making.

Where you appear to be stuck is that you think outsourcing is only workers with poor English who do grunt work. It's a rather myopic view of the situation to be polite.

Not everyone has the same requirements, skills, usage patterns, and outcomes. It's that simple.

I think where were missing each other is that the human agent can also be outsourced. Not all outsourcing involves rote tasks and the lowest skilled workers. The difference between the mean US senior dev salary and everywhere else is large enough to cover a manageable LLM cost. So there's no reason why a company looking to cut costs need stop at the lowest rung to makeup for LLM expenditure.

Outsourced can be anywhere and when you're referring to US, anywhere else is cheaper. Commonwealth devs for example are at least 20% the cost of a US dev. That 20% more than covers the cost of access to a frontier model that this dev could drive.

Thinking of LLMs in human units is super strange and if you wish to consider the economics you have to also account for the lowering of barriers to entry.

Food lab, for example, covers buying storing and cooking lamb + a guide for a 5-7lb boneless leg across 5 or so pages. Kenji goes through great lengths to build intuition. I'm sure larousse, which is more of an encyclopedia, covers lamb quite extensively but it's probably more terse.

The internet can be an excellent source, but like most things it depends on who is writing it down.

I could see LLMs being helpful to explore what's out there, like finding similar dishes or dishes involving a specific set of ingredients or dishes involving a particular technique, but a pretty poor tool for the actual technicalities of cooking or more importantly the uniquely personal aspects of food culture.

I dunno. I'd just buy larousse and on food and cooking.

To be clear I'm not arguing against this position, just questioning the confidence with which people claim that the current consumer subs are not a sustainable offering and a merely temporary.

Not an MD but have worked in cancer prevention for a while in a software capacity.

See figure 5 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34003219/

How much is Waymo burning a year? 3B on 300M ARR? Anthropic is what 5B on 20B ARR? Waymo is 3x older. Why don't we hear such confident statements about how subsidized their rides are?

It's one thing to speculate it's another to parade it as fact. Even if the S1 reveals an unprofitable business today, you can still only claim it's unlikely.

Common talking point. There's enough evidence for the counter argument that this is essentially misinformation. I have no idea why it's so often repeated with confidence.