Even your back of napkin optimistic math doesn't work.
The median white collar job in the US (picking it on purpose because it's a country with high wages, your math would be even worse in a France or Italy) is in the $60-70k. Yes you have to add benefits and etc, but we're still pretty far off 150k.
How much tokens does $80k buy you and do you think it's capable of replacing a human's output? For some, definitely. For plenty, I doubt it. Currently token costs are subsidised by the bubble frontier labs and already we're seeing tightening of budgets because it's costing more than expected
I think you never worked with ‘plenty’; most people I worked with in the past 40 years in IT I am suprised when they actually can walk in on their own. I would say most can be replaced by deepseek flash now, let alone Astra or Fable. I never know in what heaven HN people work, but my company is doing some fixing for a multinational with 20k ‘devs’, most outsourced and they are quite literally morons, far behind even bad LLMs. Their trick is basically to schedule as many calls with as many people as possible to look busy and make their timesheets somewhat plausible. And these are mostly devs. When you see the questions to jira tasks you worry about if they don’t forget to eat or go to the toilet randomly. Oh yeah, most are classified as seniors. An we visit many companies like this. So I am definitely confused how people on HN seem to think most humans can do something worthwhile.
The median white collar job in the US (picking it on purpose because it's a country with high wages, your math would be even worse in a France or Italy) is in the $60-70k. Yes you have to add benefits and etc, but we're still pretty far off 150k.
How much tokens does $80k buy you and do you think it's capable of replacing a human's output? For some, definitely. For plenty, I doubt it. Currently token costs are subsidised by the bubble frontier labs and already we're seeing tightening of budgets because it's costing more than expected