Many firms are unable to accurately measure the quality of research work and so they will be duped by the alternative marketing. The market can correct for this on a long enough time horizon if a competitor takes the opposite bet on whether this job is automate-able that way, but in the meantime you are probably out of a job and your equity goes down.

Unfortunately, that's not how most people make decisions on what to purchase. It's all about bean counting; what is cheap, vs what is expensive. Don't believe me? Why is Trump currently putting tariffs on foreign countries? Because it is cheaper to manufacture there, are their products better than American ones? No, but they're cheap.

If anyone actually talked to users and did what they wanted, then software wouldn't suck.

Also, things like visual arts and music can be watered down by devaluating the real stuff and equaling it with AI generated stuff.

Arguably, we used to be better at making physical stuff, we used to make beautiful amps, synths and drum machines, which to this day are highly valued only has software equivalents today.

These companies are not selling the world on a vision where LLMs are a companion tool, instead, they are selling the world on some idea that this is the new AI coworker. That 80/20 rule you're calling out is explained away with words like “junior employee.”

Companies driving AI are dinosaurs, funded by dinosaurs or aiming to become like them.

It literally feels like nothing has changed in 30 years.

There is absolutely no knowledge gap in learning to use AI tools. Only non-developers have issues, and they dominated the discourse with make-believe fantasy problems. Writing text, organizing markdown documents, writing good specifications... this is just not hard at all. Any developer can pick it up in a week, it's not a matter of adaptation, it's a matter of choice.