I am a small entity, expecting less than $250k in yearly revenue. Somehow I’d be honored to be on that list. I wouldn’t expect to end up there either.
And I could just accept crypto to circumvent any actual regulation, of course that would not be the wording or advice on my service, I’d just disable bank and credit card payments for the US and allow Crypto payments only. That’s how a lot of Chinese and Russian services already operate and have so for over a decade.
Crypto would be convenient as I can even pay my inference in crypto and exchange it to cash at little to no scrutiny while still allowing it to be taxed.
Living outside of the US (and EU). I’m in the process of launching an agent assisted automated pentesting and authorized offensive security service. I’m using open weights models to execute the entire audit. So lets for a moment entertain the idea that the US somehow locks open weights. How are they going to stop such audits or actual attackers? A competing service in the US simple won’t be able to execute the same level of audits because many of the models refuse following penetration and offensive security testing instructions. An actual attacker is not going to limit itself to those models either. Why would anyone serious about security then limit itself too.
In the end, as a non-US entity; how would the US even stop me from providing services to US companies in private? Well I have a US LLC now, but the moment they become serious about this it takes me a few weeks to incorporate in HK or SG.
Due to all their fumbling I decided to not even try Fable. Why get used to a model with limited shelve life when I can just use the older models that do well for me? Well then 5.6 came out, now Kimi came out and I’m just letting my Anthropic subscription expire. Anthropic will need to do a whole lot better because this just ain’t it.
Instead the same workers would be unemployed if they stopped doing these kind of jobs all together. There are few options in the Philippines, and BPO is actually a well respected career and skillset that is worthwhile to refine. There is very little “etc. etc”; especially if you’ve relied on this skillset for years.
Seeing the growing unemployment in the Philippines in the BPO sector, how is this wasted? The alternative is they don’t have a job. What should they be doing instead?
Have you tried accepting less than 200k? Sub 100k maybe. Works for me (at 40+). And then just work several clients as contractor. Beats flipping burgers, comes out at more than 200k.
AI still can’t fake a 50$ background check and verifiable references from past employers or clients you worked for. So I wouldn’t worry about juniors masquerading as seniors. Doing due diligence now is more important than ever.
Anyone that has played civ long enough has done something like that too. I just start pillaging farm land as well, but of course a nuclear strike when you can no longer win would also be my favorite way to rage quit the round. Of course, this piece is going to probably make its round in the news cycles and people’s mind who never played civ. Hopefully they never allow it to play LoL and interact with other players at the same level of salt and toxicity; that would deeply trouble me.
The tokens/salary ratio is not relevant at all. Because while 200-500$ is a lot of money, it’s still a fraction of the salary you’d pay any dev in the world. It just comes out as a tooling expense. It also matters how those devs use the tools; you can’t assume everyone gets the same out of it. So that amount can last a day or it can last a month. I would say a dev in a developing nation would be more budget aware than someone being used to everything being priced in NYC rates.
For example I build other AI products and I have been hyper aware of the token spend of our users. I was going crazy seeing that some users were having 5$ conversations. So that was optimized and I found ways to use sub agents to get it down to 1-2$. Just for management asking me why I was worrying to begin with? The users using these are consultants being paid 120$ per hour. They have a daily 10-20$ token expense, no problem. “But amazing job on the cost reduction.”.. well 5$ for me is what I spend on food daily. While the consultant is slamming: “yes” 10 times in a chat , for whatever reason for the same cost. Would the NYC dev care as much natively? No.
You can still hire three devs in India for the price of a dev in NYC. Now you give them AI and you might only need 1-2. That makes offshoring even more appealing, not less. And the dev in India now having tooling to out compete local talent. Well that’s my reality (I am not in India though).
You made me realize something. I routinely spend upwards of 500$ per month on LLMs for coding (expensed towards clients). However I live in a place where 500$ is around the avg. salary. I’m lucky that I know my way around western clients. Clients who pay these expenses and are happy to work with me because I am still about 50% cheaper than local talent in EU/US, while my salary at home converts to an upper class income at the highest tax bracket.
Which of course causes some unfairness on both ends. Nobody here can compete with me. I often use left over tokens on local client projects; which despite lower pay, still pays off because they now take hours not days or weeks to complete. And nobody in the local clients talent pool can compete with me; unless they charge about half the market rate.
Take away my 500$ monthly grant; and I’d be more or less screwed. Better open models will more or less start to reduce this advantage. It’s not like I positioned myself here on purpose. But it’s definitely a „right place, right time“ situation.
Are you actually seeing any signs that we’re going back to how software was written before, and needing those skills in the same way? Because I sure am not seeing that right now. As someone who vibe codes 100% and has become managements favorite, while being more or less allowed to break the platform every other release I know my skills are atrophying. But it’s taking me different places in my career entirely. There’s a path to managing other engineers now that opened years before it would have previously. Even writing this makes it sound ridiculous, but that’s what’s infront of me right now. There is an entirely other set of skills that I’m interested in sharpening now. Definitely no more sitting down several hours per day and meeting about system design and integrations with others.
I am still trying to find a replacement for cursor. But in the past 30D my automations and my own coding has consumed well above 10 billion tokens for less than 300$ with auto and composer 2.5; while building a fairly stable product with 20-30 daily active users. It feels like it’s too good to be true, because I’ve tried with Claude and codex and it just feels so much more expensive.