Interesting piece. The author claims that LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT are mere interfaces for the same kind of algorithms that corporations have been using for decades and that the real “AI Revolution” is that regular people have access to them, where before we did not.
From the article:
Consider what it took to use business intelligence software in 2015. You needed to buy the software, which cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. You needed to clean and structure your data. You needed to learn SQL or tableau or whatever visualization tool you were using. You needed to know what questions to ask. The cognitive and financial overhead was high enough that only organizations bothered.
Language models collapsed that overhead to nearly zero. You don’t need to learn a query language. You don’t need to structure your data. You don’t need to know the right technical terms. You just describe what you want in plain English. The interface became conversation.
Corporate algorithms gave them that power, or at least have been helping them to maintain it for decades. The article uses the very real example of RealPage, whose YieldStar software was helping landlords manage over 3 million rental properties in the US by 2022. Ultimately it took ProPublica to pull back the curtain on a computed market where an algorithm was telling landlords how much to charge tenants for a majority of the market. And even then, I don’t think it’s stopped. Landlords are still coordinating rent prices across the vast majority of rental properties, and all the common folk has to help is, like the article says, “Zillow and a prayer”.
This is exactly my point. The ability for companies to gouge consumers is exacerbated by algorithms, sure. But they have power because the regulatory rules are either in their favor or not.
Even exposing it as you note didn’t change it. Likewise individual consumers don’t have the ability to change it. It’s a red herring and false solution to say “AI can fix it.”