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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9628 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026

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I wonder how many of the 10k/month/employee companies are all venture backed by the same firms that are backing the big frontier companies?

I wonder how many of those firms are getting $10k/month of productivity boost?

I have no difficulty believing that many jobs can do that, but as Uber shows, adding AI isn’t automatically worth the giant bill.

$10k/month is $120k/yr which is a decent entry-level or mid-level white-collar salary, depending on the specific field. So you could reframe the question as "Is heavy AI use more productive than hiring another employee"?

The answer is debatable and changes based on circumstance but -- yes. AI is not just doubling or tripling performance but for some workers makes them an order of magnitude more powerful than they were before. There are people out there doing work in days that would have taken teams months before.

The productivity gain is not observed in fake email jobs where adding AI tokens to unproductive work simply makes it more unproductive.

120k/yr which is a decent entry-level or mid-level white-collar salary, depending on the specific field.

Don't forget overhead... although perhaps with corporate tax breaks it evens out back near 120k.

AI is not just doubling or tripling performance but for some workers makes them an order of magnitude more powerful than they were before

The hope I'm sure is that it's the senior folks, who are themselves worth far more than that $120k/year.

That's the thing, when your venture board member says jump, venture firms pretty much have to say "how high?", regardless of what the return is on jumping, because they need the next round at a higher value.

I doubt those firms would all choose the same allocation if they weren't venture backed.

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