No AI companies were able to make profit so far, and unemployed masses surely won't buy expensive ChatGPT subscriptions.

Will AI labs make profit from AI using companies? Hardly, unemployed masses can't and won't buy their products either, therefore they won't be able to afford even more expensive ChatGPT Enterprise subscriptions. (For crying out loud, even big corps like Uber can't pay all their AI bills.)

And if AI labs have no profits, how are they supposed to pay the hyperscalers for computing capacity? They will run out of investor money pretty soon.

And if hyperscalers can't rent out their data centers to AI labs, how are they supposed to pay for the electricity (gas/diesel/etc.) and water bills and repay their already enormous debts?

I honestly don't see how replacing all workers with AI could be profitable at all.

In a public company, you need financial growth. You need 75% of employees to be developing towards a promising new future. In a private company, with no real growth goals, you can get by with 25% and keep things running and basically the same.

You can argue whether Twitter's extra 75% actually was effective at driving growth the stock market likes, but its hard to argue against needing more staff to drive at least a perception that investments are happening in bold new product directions.

The site was broken for eternity after that, but people continued to use it as it was the only source of real time news. In many ways its not the old Twitter at all.

Now the head counts dont even matter because its all agents writing the code, reviewing the code, and deploying the code.

Their companies perfected the addiction/extraction economy.