I think you underestimate the price by a few orders of magnitude where it makes sense to pay a model instead of a human. If someone earning 200,000 a year gets replaced by paying 500 a day to Anthropic or OpenAI their employer comes out ahead.
There's likely always going to be value in limiting the number of $200k+ SWEs you have to pay. But that's not the interesting case.
What about the $10k/year offshored employees that are getting replaced by AI call centers? If that were the break even, then once you close down the whole building and develop the systems to not need them, then how much would inference costs have to go up before all that gets unwound and handed back to humans? It's more than you think - there's real margin there.
