1. Awful compared to what? 2. Was there an equivalent transfer outside America? 3. What is the cause? What ratio rent-seeking/shady activity vs a consequence of natural forces (e.g. technological change)

This assertion is based on comparing reality with a counterfactual where income distributions remained static from 1975 to the present. Real median personal income roughly doubled over this time period.

The use of the word "transferred" seems a little intellectually dishonest here. The use of the counterfactual seems to suggest that income distribution has no relationship with growth in total income, and total income would have been exactly the same regardless of income distribution. I see no reason to assume that to be the case.

They desperately need LLMs to stay rentier and hardware advances are a direct attack on their model.

1. Models become commodities and immensely cheaper to operate for inference as a result of some future innovation. This would presumably be very bad for the handful of companies who have invested that $1T and want to recoup that, but great for those of us who love cheap inference.

2. #1 doesn't happen and the model providers start begin to feel empowered to pass the true cost of training + inference down to the model consumer. We start paying thousands of dollars per month for model usage and the price gate blocks out most people from reaping the benefits of bleeding-edge AI, instead being locked into cheaper models that are just there to extract cash by selling them things.

Personally I'm leaning toward #1. Future models near as good as the absolute best will get far cheaper to train, and new techniques and specialized inference chips will make them much cheaper to use. It isn't hard for me to imagine another Deepseek moment in the not-so-distant future. Perhaps Anthropic is thinking the same thing given the rumors that they are rumored to be pushing toward an IPO as early as this year.

If you want the best, then pay.

Perhaps all of these data centers won't be needed. At least not by some of the current AI companies that won't keep up. If that happens to OpenAI, that would be quite a shock to the financial system (and GDP).

Microsoft's changes to windows have alienated some of their userbase. Copilot is poor compared to it's rivals. There's a reason they are down 20%. Linux adoption use is accelerating (still too low!).

And don't forget AI on device. When it becomes "good enough" for most tasks, data centre use will reduce.

With the talk of Nvidia backtracking and saying they won't invest 100 billion in OpenAI, Oracle in a poor financial position with the loan's for it's upcoming data centres becoming more expensive and dubious (they could fail to pay them)- the picture isn't as positive as you make it out to be. Which makes me think that you have an ulterior motive.