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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   6070 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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LLM Bulls: Current SOTA LLMs are capable of replacing a sizeable portion of human knowledge work. Near-future models or future architectures promise AGI, then ASI in short order. The world won't know what hit it.

One thing that consistently elude any of the forecast are financials. If LLMs/AI are posed to completely disrupt all the knowledge work, why do we not see it in stocks? We are talking insane money, knowledge work employs around 1 billion people globally with total compensation of at least $50 trillion. Should we not see some huge impact if this technology is so near? For instance MS stock is the same as in 2023 - it does not seem as if Open AI is posed to be key for replacement of tens of trillions of dollars of value a year.

I would even be for the reverse signal - e.g. AI will be so cheap, that all this $50 trillion work will be done by $1 trillion of AI agents with some electricity etc, so no surge in AI stocks. Okay, so where is the pandemonium and stock apocalypse of the companies, which will be for sure worthless in the face of AI where investors should shift into something less AI prone such as construction or whatnot?

If LLMs/AI are posed to completely disrupt all the knowledge work, why do we not see it in stocks?

IBM's stock is absolutely shitting the bed at the moment, and roughly corresponds with anthropic claiming they can handle cobol now.

IBM stock dropped about 10% and now is back up like 3%. Sure, there was a bit but hardly existential.

Okay, so where is the pandemonium and stock apocalypse of the companies

There was a big stock market rumble only a few weeks ago after Claude Cowork and a few plugins were released. Forbes article:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelashley/2026/02/18/saaspocalypse-now-claudes-11-plugins-triggered-a-285b-wipeout/

Not perhaps the trillions that would clearly prove the point, but it's something.

This case also kind of demonstrates why the stock market isn't super predictive for AI: there's just not enough knowledge. The plugins Anthropic released are extremely simple add-ons. They don't represent new capabilities at all; it would be like seeing major stock market turmoil because a company updated their documentation.

We're probably going to see very spiky updates from the stock market as business normies suddenly catch up to SOTA every 6 months or so.

Another point to consider is how much value we would actually expect to see wiped out/added. I just saw this tweet this morning, responding to an economic bear case:

https://x.com/elidourado/status/2026060408055021752

There's a much larger point in the tweet, but the relevant point for us:

B2B SaaS is less than half a percent of US GDP. It's simply not an important industry relative to anything macroeconomic.

Thus far all the expectations around replacement have been B2B SaaS, but if it's only 0.5% (and even bulls probably don't think the entire industry is being replaced), what amount would we expect?

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