* Hardware improvements will reduce costs

* Model training improvements (read: more efficient model training) will reduce costs

* Better models will reduce costs (more inference for less hardware time while keeping quality constant)

* Tooling and platform will stabilize—less need to dump money into applications and backend systems because they will become mature—also improvements in AI efficiency and quality will lower the cost of maintenance and future feature development

* Energy buildout will stabilize (we will eventually have enough energy supply to meet AI demand)

* Chips market will stabilize (chip supply will catch up to AI demand, lowering the hardware costs)

I'm very pessimistic that this is about AI safety. I think it's probably more about giving the Trump administration leverage over AI companies. It will be able to coerce them into e.g. propagandizing or surveilling or similar or else they will risk the same kind of "regulatory oversight" that caused television networks to fire comedians who made jokes the regime didn't like.

I was traveling through the state and got on a toll road by accident without cash to pay the tolls, the toll booth employee said I could just pay online, pointing to a sign that said "missed a toll? pay online at ", so we continued our trip intending to pay the tolls online. At the end of the trip, I logged on to pay our tolls--the application insisted that we enter the specific toll IDs of each toll that we missed, even though we didn't know we were supposed to be recording any toll IDs. If you didn't know the toll IDs, you could use a map application to look up the toll IDs, but the map application would crash within a second of opening it and even if you managed to get a screenshot the resolution was so low that the text was indecipherable. When I called the support number, they told me that I would be fined triple the cost of the tolls if I didn't pay within a week, but I would be able to pay without knowing the specific toll IDs that I missed. When I asked the agent to tell me what tolls I missed (clearly they knew if they were going to fine me), they told me they couldn't tell me for another week. I pointed out that this would be after the toll deadline and they relentlessly tried to avoid acknowledging that simple fact. Eventually I sent them my best guess about what I owed with a letter stating what I had attempted and that I would contact a lawyer about any fines and never heard from them again.

Some years later, after moving to Chicago, I had to file state taxes for the first time. The state issued me a driver's license with a 12 digit number, but the state tax form only allowed me to authenticate with an 8 digit Illinois driver's license number (the other acceptable forms of identification didn't apply to me for reasons I no longer remember).

This is a non sequitur. If the economy contracts and 99% of these businesses go under, 1% may well remain (“they exist…”) but that does not mean that all is well (“they will be fine”).

> They aren't so beholden to the wider economy as their customer base is local

The local economy in most of America is highly coupled with larger corporations. Either the large corporations are the major employers or the large corporations are the major customers for the area’s employers. Even if it’s not that, everything is tightly coupled to the banking system, as we learned in 2008.