Charts into the future with an exponential curve. Right.

Look, I could have believed linear at least to some asymptote. And then you plot the exponential to the asymptote after the fact, because curves are nicer.

But at this point, exponential growth into the future that far out is 'busboy giving investment advice' exuberance.

Plot what % of GPP and PPP this represents, and then plot the overhang of debt, and the cycle time to a market correction, and tell me you still think an exponential growth story is going to happen "up and to the right" in this.

Are these numbers full time employees only or total FTEs? Because it mentions Walmart: "Walmart’s full-time employees number remained relatively constant for the last 10 years".

Would revenue / person-hour show a different trend? Because there are a lot of part-time and contract workers out there.

The profit increases are from price gouging and anticompetitive behaviors; these companies don't need to provide value to increase their profits anymore.

The number of iphones sold per year is about constant over the last decade. The amount of materials and work-hours in each iphone is probably constant. So if there are no alternatives, "number go up".

The phenomenon is probably a consequent of monetary inflation and lock-in.

What if we implement UBI in a way that:

1. Companies not participating in UBI: they have to hire people, even for nothing, but all the staff have to be paid.

2. The others: they are focused on making money without hiring people ("efficient money-making machines"), so they are forced to participate in UBI, and therefore distribute their wealth towards society.

So long with "efficient money-making machines".

The capital [in these companies] might not be as decoupled as portrayed but rather funneled from the labor which is not in their employment. This is more glaring in ad tech. For the manufacturers in the list, you have to consider the cheap labor they outsource too, among many other factors. You have to look at global/overall labor statistics vs capital. There might be a trend there but the article doesn’t expand or do any investigation.

It is surreal. It goes like: revenue growth > headcount growth in select companies, therefore capital alchemy on global scale + something something AGI.

Confounding several things here. Of course revenue per head is higher for platform monopolies especially as they get bigger.

> (...) think pieces on how our lives have become consistently better thanks to these tech companies!

[citation needed]

The data presented only talks about the revenue of the companies, not their effect on the lives of their customers (which is admittedly difficult to measure).

The "I personally don't find short form videos too addicting" sentence is just anecdata and dismisses the negative impacts. In my opinion, being able to instantly access content that "makes [you] smile for free" is not obviously a good thing. Even if attention spans weren't affected, I think the brain is wired for homeostasis (balance), and easy sources of dopamine are dangerous since they affect the main motivation to do real, impactful tasks.

Ultimately, it's unclear whether modern (2010s-now) tech companies have _consistently_ improved lives overall. There have certainly been positive changes but also negative ones. Let me know what you think.

The author’s examples are very prominent tech companies during a period of rapid growth in the industry and a single massive retailer (Walmart) with a big online presence. For comparison , I spot checked Target: revenue increased from $85B in 2020 to about 105B$ in 2024, about a ~20% increase. Headcount went from ~ 360,000 to 440,000 during that period, also a ~ 20% increase.

I think a better title might be the less catchy, ‘The decoupling of headcount and revenue at quasi-monopolistic tech companies that are scaling platform products and services.”

Also revenue and capital are not interchangeable terms. The author appears to be confused over this point.

There is a optical illusion that happens on this page for me. When scrolling down or up around the black and white bar graph, a halo around the text (either above or below the bar graph bars), flashes a green hue. Speed seems to matter. Can anyone confirm else see this? I wonder what this optical illusion is called?

On topic though, digital goods and specialized robotics/automatic manufacturing made the first part of this graph possible, now we are on the cusp of generalizable robotics and AI for an even steeper curve. Even if LLMs stay as dumb as they are now, there are incredible gains to be made from them.

Isn’t that how economies of scale is supposed to work?

We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.

Many of these companies have overlapping products and services. If they were to properly combine into a single entity they could probably shed a good fraction of their employees.

Think about it does AMD need to exist at all? Wouldnt NVIDIA be worth more if they didnt exist?

I suspect this has much less to do with AI than the consolidation of industries, especially tech. There’s almost zero antitrust enforcement left in this country, and it shows in these numbers and in the lack of meaningful technological advancement.

As much as it easier to exponentially grow, it will also be easy for companies to shrink earnings or relative status in the hierarchy. This is especially true for companies that make the bulk of their profit selling software.

From spring 2019 to July of this year, I worked at IT at a Fortune 100 retailer.

The project I worked on was enormously successful in terms of revenue growth. I, and people on my team had a huge nationwide impact, which started when we were about a dozen people (it has grown now to several dozen).

Whereas even a manager of one of the big box stores would only have a limited geographical impact. Whereas my work would always have nation-wide impact (and at some companies programmers would have world-wide impact). I turned on a payment option for my platform one quarter, and very quickly people were using it for one million a month in purchases. Which kept going up.

The book Capitalism without Capital talks about this. Some aspects of it are alluded to in Fred Brooks 1975 book The Mythical Man Month.

To build a car, a lot of effort has to be made in making the car - not just the end result, but the making the glass, tires and so forth. Whereas with programming, I write an app, or a feature for an app, and the end result is duplicated and distributed around the country (or even around the world) for free, or virtually free. I'm not helping make commodities one at a time like someone on an automobile line is. It is something different.

AGI is an asymptote. I love it.

Garbage.

1) There's a paywall for part of it.

2) The author finally figured out that, in software, revenue does not scale with labor. The author has not figured out that this applies just as much to a 1 man startup as to a megacorp.

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Technology is inherent deflationary due to scaling laws of increasing productivity. This is awesome because think if all the zero or very cheap apps etcs. The productivity is largely based on lack of regulation which allows innovationto occur at speed. Now if we only could deregulate "meatspace" applications (think nuclear, housing, etc) we might be able to achieve great gains.