1975: "One of our salaried PhD-level engineers designed this custom slide rule so that you guys can do cost estimates when speaking to customers on site."

2025: "We spent a bajillion dollars on a custom LLM chatbot so that you guys can get hallucinated product specs when speaking to customers on Zoom."

Here's what I think would happen if anyone, by tomorrow, could download GPT 5.1 for free and run it performantly on something like a $500 laptop:

* It would stop datacenter- and other related infrastructure construction, making huge investments effectively worthless for companies like Oracle and Amazon, and of course hurt the construction sector.

* It would hurt the companies you mention, plus a many more including NVidia, likely in ways that would lead to large-scale layoffs.

* It would seriously hurt corporate and VC investors and likely make them much less interested in large investments for quite some time, thus affecting other sectors as well.

* It would seriously hurt index funds and pension funds.

A number of years down the line, if LLMs are indeed capable of significantly boosting productivity, I'm sure we'd see a recovery, but when large bubbles suddenly burst there's usually some pretty serious fallout.

> What happens tomorrow if eg ChatGPT 5.1 performance becomes doable for $500 of tech? $50?

The bubble would burst and the US economy would face a recession?

...which is and has been used, very successfully, in the service of propaganda used to consolidate resources and power.

Interesting examples with WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3, which were both dominant for about 10 years during the 1980s and early 1990s. Since then, Microsoft has been dominant in the same segment - for a whopping 30-35 years. During this time, they've made massive, unpopular interface overhauls, released products that nearly everyone dislikes but still has to use for some reason (Teams comes to mind), offer basically zero end user support and have moved from one-off license purchases to SaaS subscriptions.

Either Microsoft has managed to get it "just right" for more than three decades, or there's something else at play, too.