Gumroad Says That It's Now Spending as Much on Human Employees as AI Tokens

Weird move to release this for a company that has mostly artists as customers but they were already kind of persona non grata for other reasons.

Huh, I guess if you don’t have human employees you don’t need human customers. Thanks for the heads up!

> Gumroad’s official account posted that its support SLA had dropped to 15 minutes, down from 24 hours earlier this year. Lavingia added that the team is currently averaging two minutes per response, a number that would have been unthinkable for a company running a traditional support desk.

That are quantities, what about the quality? Are the customers satisfied or do they reopen nee tickets often?

Reminds me of quick math

No, sir, I don't like it.

They also laid everyone off and their spend went from 400k to 40k so… this feels like a baity post.

You can't do real science in that setting, it's a confirmation bias machine. The social network feed ranking model collapse is coming from inside the company now.

Why do they disclose this thinking it's good? It's a reverse advertisement.

Every dollar spent on AI is roughly speaking a dollar spent on the human labor that produces that AI. But I imagine there is a ceiling to AI use: how much inference a small tightly integrated team, or a lone founder, can apply productively.

If we do a mental exercise where we imagine every tech company follows Gumroad's trajectory until it is down to an executive team that directs the AI agents, we would end up with an economy where most people work or co-own companies with a handful of employees/partners working closely together — or just a solo founder working on their own — and each company employs a massive number of AI agents that enable it to match the productivity of a large pre-AI corporation.