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A surge in AI-driven productivity could trigger hyper-deflation, making items once priced at $100 drop to a penny, billionaire investor Marc Andreessen said recently.
The Andreessen Horowitz co-founder described a future in which “the price of business services will collapse, and things that today cost a lot of money will all of a sudden all be cheap or free,” he told the “Cheeky Pint” podcast earlier this month, arguing that fears of mass impoverishment miss the bigger picture.
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Andreessen opened the discussion by rejecting the notion that AI’s success would devastate employment. He said it’s a “great economic fallacy” to assume that hyper-productivity must result in poverty. The real outcome, he suggested, would be massive oversupply and price collapse.
Expanding on that, he said, “Everything that costs $100 will sell for a penny.” He clarified that this scenario assumes extreme gains in output.
“Even if it played out, the result would be hyper-deflation of prices, which is the thing that people miss,” he said. Under those conditions, he argued, business services and other goods would become essentially free or extremely cheap.
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Andreessen claimed AI will amplify human capability rather than erase human roles. “AI just makes every individual a super-PhD in every topic,” he said, adding that people will be capable of producing far more than before.
He also pushed back against alarm over job losses, saying the shifts won’t come as fast as many fear. A portion of American jobs — those in licensed professions, unions, or civil service — cannot be displaced easily.
He suggested sectors like medicine and law will remain less disrupted in the near term due to regulatory and licensing constraints. “ChatGPT is in fact a better doctor than your doctor today,” he said, but added that it “can’t literally be your doctor” because of broader responsibilities and limitations.
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Other tech leaders have also weighed in on how AI will reshape jobs — but their views differ sharply. In a Sept. 17 interview with Axios, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said AI’s ability to displace human work is accelerating quickly and that firms and governments need to “warn the world about it,” as up to half of entry-level white-collar jobs could vanish within five years.
