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In terms of personal life, I certainly find AI tools pretty useful especially given how awful Google is now, and coding tools are indispensable at work.
I think if there's a $6T market, it will come via integrations with the products and workflows of large companies, which is obviously also happening. Apparently the tech sector as a whole is worth $5 to $10T, so it's actually not inconceivable there's $6T worth of value there (especially since the value will not be constrained to the tech sector).
Which is the point of the post. Niche apps and use cases aren't with 6 trillion annually.
But taking those bespoke contraptions to market is not something I want to out effort into. Especially when anyone can just clone it with AI.
The AI revolution might not show up so easily in GDP.
The articles says "AI needs $6T in annual revenue."
That is definitely adding to the annual revenue figure.
Now are there useful applications of these tools (not gods) that might justify a sizeable new tech market? Absolutely yes! Is that market ever be going to be worth trillions a year? LOL hell no.
So where is the value? Have you built that one application you always wished existed but it wasn't available?
Yes, more than one and I use them a lot. Not being good at design and not liking front-end, among a few other things, work always stopped from from building them before,
> So you've unlocked tremendous value, but you're not earning any money?
No, I also don't make money from my coffee machine, but it provides value.
The blog post is here for anyone interested: https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/p/i-spent-the-last-month...
Things are happening… and quickly, even if we are not quite to the point where VC’s are ready fund prototypes of robots to fold your laundry. Most of what’s happening is nerds finally building the project they’ve always dreamed of outside the traditional funding pathways.
To be fair the chances of the laundry folding robot is quite a bit higher then that of the hyperloop, but my point is that I believe it when I see it. And even when I see it, I will be skeptical that this AI lunacy we are in now is directly responsible for laundry folding robots, that is I think we could have laundry folding robots without those trillions of dollars of datacenter investments and training of LLMs.
I have yet to see any truly great products made with heavily agentic coding. Correct me if I'm wrong?
One of the things that was promised in 2024 was a "deflationary spiral" for physical goods and the economy in general because of insane efficiencies that AI would supposedly bring. I believed that whole-heartedly and I was a huge AI fanboi even as my artists friends and Lib Arts friends were complaining.
We're in almost October 2026 now and they're nowhere in sight. We have a bunch of unreliable agents that do clerical and design work here and there, but where are all the industrial productivity boosts? If AI were so good, large industries and factories should be adopting them as a never-before-seen scale. Where are they?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49735506
Half a year is not a lot of time when it comes to meaningful change in directions that matter.
But go and talk to small companies. What they are able to pull off is just incredible. More features in shorter time. Improved UX and client satisfaction.
On a society level 6 months is nothing. This will take about 10 years to penetrate all organizations I assume.
And I remember times when people got angry at companies for "improving their UX" and breaking the daily routines of their users.
I'm pretty confident I can release it in October, after some 500 hours of work.
Usually in these discussions I get "so it has zero users then".
One time someone on here told me that for AI to prove its worth for software engineering, my application would need to be in use already for at least ten years.
Since Fedora moves old releases to some mirror it's a nightmare to update old installs.
Now I did it very conveniently. Did I build a space ship with the help of ChatGPT? No. Is it useful to me? Yes.
I'm doing many much cooler things that I haven't released yet but I am launching projects I never dreamed I could do as a solo dev in 2-3 months.
https://www.stripeeconomics.com/p/the-saaspocalypse-was-more...
At home, Claude has been a god send to make it easy to learn using linux, and all sort of technologies. My personal learning curve has gone steep at an age where people start flattening out (40s).
At work, we use AI to automate 50-75% of our work. Better quality output, more productivity. I work in a bank. But the average plumber or electrician benefits too. In minutes they can become an expert into some tech they never touched before.
I thought crypto was bullshit, web 3.0 [corrected] was bullshit, meta-universe was bullshit. AI is bubbly, not sure how you can justify multi-trillon valuations for companies with 80% operating margin in a competitive market where you can switch to the competitor with a drop down. But the productivity gains will be massive for the economy. I think the economy will ultimately reap the reward, not so much the labs. But I may be wrong.
I expect Open AI or Anthropic to make it through. XAI will go back to being a side hustle for SpaceX. And some open weight model will run on your own hardware or AWS. Copilot will remain a piece of trash and Gemini will be an untrusted 4th option.
Your own personal learning curve has also gone up when, if your thesis is correct, it is useless for it to have gone up because it is a skill that we may not need anyone to use, and we definitely won't need someone who learned it last week to use.
That's more of what people mean by no revenue. I'm actually bullish on some revenue coming in from language learning, because in-ear translation will always have a delay and involves constantly wearing equipment, but Linux learning seems like a big zero if models are supposed to be good enough to essentially replace OS UI.
> But the average plumber or electrician benefits too. In minutes they can become an expert into some tech they never touched before.
They're already fine at learning from the manual. They have a lot of background. The AI will 1) only annoy them with how much it gets wrong, and 2) not give them any practice with the things they have to learn with their hands. They may be helped by AI powered robotics.
The idea that the commercial value will all be capitalized is a farce. Qwen3.8 seems to me to have hit the threshold to these things being good enough without every buying a single cloud service.
That should scare cloud AI more than it obviously does.
There was a Bank of Korea study that showed AI saved workers about 1.5 hours a week, with with no increase in output. Just because I'm more productive at a task, it doesn't mean the people up or downstream of my work benefit. And my time probably gets sucked into meetings. (In the study, solo entrepreneurs did benefit--probably because they own everything end to end)
In term of cool little projects, there's all sort of things that people are doing to improve their own lives or make interesting things. No shame if you're incurious about those.
I mean, I don't know that there is some sort of AI equivalent of the lifechanging magic of rural electrictrifcation. But I don't know that it was ever likely in the near term anyway.
https://github.com/RideControlOrg/RideControl
> Maybe it's just me, but nothing has changed in my life so far.
Manifest whatever you want!
You go to the website, you connect your trainer, you ride your bike and you get healthy.
wtf do you care about a readme for? =)
Wouldn't have been possible.
Maybe you are not looking in the right place. Maybe your expectations are not right. Maybe the revolution isn't a super app but a mini app. Not an app with code written so beautifully it could win a Pulitzer but an app that will be used a couple of times and then discarded.
I am trying to offer an alternate viewpoint (I don't necessarily support it but I thought it was needed).
This is almost by definition not revolutionary
I'm currently using it as a basis for building a systems language with Rust's memory guarantees, but with new features like generators and co-routines, and effects instead of colored functions. The fact that the borrow checker's properties are formally proven means I can trust more of what Claude is doing than you normally would be able to do.
But hey, you can now close yourself off even more, not interact with anyone or develop a skill to get a dumb bash script for a menial task you wouldn’t miss that much anyway if you didn’t have it. Woopie, totally worth it!
For example, the article suggests $1T from enterprise productivity tooling. A quick Google suggests the global enterprise productivity tooling market is only worth about $0.1T right now.
Do we really expect all the world’s corporations to suddenly up their annual spend by 1,000% on average? Why?
This of course hinges on the big if: does AI create wealth? I think yes, but maybe not $6 trillion of it in five years.
At a time when corporate CEOs are largely saying that they can't see that AI has improved office productivity at all, why should we believe that a killer productivity application of genai that's amazing enough to justify an order of magnitude increase in enterprise spending on productivity tools is just around the corner?
I think CEOs could honestly say it a year ago, but by now the numbers of those who say so should be dwindling.
Recent surveys by BCG and others suggest things have changed.
Personally, I know many people in different fields who’ve seen crazy speed ups in many of their tasks.
I see how useful AI tools are for myself and can't imagine it not changing the world over the next few decades.
There is also the question of time scale. Growing a market takes time. Assuming the numbers above are the right order of magnitude, we are not going from 0.1 to 1 in a year. So even if the number would make sense over longer time frames, it can still be unsustainable for a significant amount of time before that.
Like the Internet at the end if the 1990s, basically.
But also the car business is far larger than the horse business ever was. It is not zero-sum; every time Henry Ford's factory spit out a new model T, real wealth was being created.
Money is just a standin for wealth. If we suddenly doubled the amount of wealth in the world, we could just print more dollars to match - or the existing dollars would just become worth twice as much.
For example, if I'm a landlord that uses AI to more intelligently price rental increases to maximize profit without attrition, I have created more revenue but not more wealth.
Play positive sum games.
That said, this came too late for investors in the dot-com boom. AI investors may find themselves in a similar situation.
However, customers coming up with the money is the easy half of the problem. The hard part is having them pay you.
Wikipedia's valuation is on the small side of {number of people on the internet worldwide} * {peak price of Encyclopaedia Britannica} † despite containing a lot more content.
LLMs can only chase high margins while they're ahead of their competitors; the moment the investment stalls, open weighs catch up, they loose their edge. Cloud compute providers still win on supplying inference, but there too competition will likely lower margins, not justify huge valuations.
NVIDIA may remain as valuable as today, but their P/E ratio will likely shrink a lot even while keeping up the price.
Model makers still have a problem here even if the tech is so useful it rapidly grows the economy: "free" is right behind them almost immediately after they stop.
* under the assumption the tech is real; there's plenty of people here on Hacker News who still dismiss it as a "scam"
† that would be about 13 trillion USD, from what I read
If they keep replacing employees with AI, that is indeed the direction.
Eventually this merry-go-round runs into some issues if we don’t figure out a way to make this huge productivity boom work.
There's no hard and fast rule that humans need to be involved in the economy, it's just that until recently, you needed to pay them in order to have an economy that worked.
Corporations are legally people; give them enough brains, and they may become a real boy one day.
1) This would make stocks worth a lot more and produce more dividends so everyone owning stock would get money to spend.
2) Governments effectively indirectly own ~40% of all business profits via corporate taxes, capital gains taxes, dividend taxes, sales taxes. So governments would also have more revenues to spend/redistribute (this depends on governments not wasting it, spending it on wars etc.)
That doesn't mean the wheels won't fall off, they fall off pretty regularly as is.
The difference between this loop and the previous loops, is that people making the tech used to be pretty straightforward ("invest in me, your money will let me make a machine that lets me fire 90% of my peasants and we can share in the savings"), while today they're all "invest in me, either this will kill everyone or just make the concept of money irrelevant, either way rotflmao".
If this does or doesn't happen with AI kinda depends how fast it makes multiple different sections of the population unemployed, rather than just one group like "software developer" or "vehicle driver".
The other factor that threatens the $6T required to justify... open source models crushing the pricing power of these companies. If I can use some open source agent management framework + self-hosted Qwen to basically replace my entire Product org for free, then why would I pay Microsoft/Google/Anthropic/OpenAI?
So, I have the following thoughts:
How much more productive can AI for knowledge work realistically make the global economy? 5%, 10%, 20%?
What if it also does robotics soon and can be deployed in manufacturing and construction? Can we get 50% more productive, or 200%?
Then there's science, medicine, and so on. Who is to say what happens if AI solves also that?
While I do not know if AI will be capable for these use cases, I see no reason to believe it unlikely that AI could be applicable to eg. robotics and speed up production by factor 3x.
Still though, the thesis seems based on an assumption that the companies would experience either major growth or major efficiency gain, neither of which really pass the smell test to me. Option 1 growth - money has to come from somewhere ultimately? Option 2 efficiency - put into profit rather than simple offset to AI provider?
Or the AI providers get companies hooked with subsidized pricing that unwinds later and you end up with the Uber/AirBNB situation of market capture and good product reverting to mean level of price/quality over time. Tinfoil hat thinks it ultimately gets squeezed out of retail investors in index funds.
They already figured they would need trillions revenue. So they paint an economic where such amount is plausible.
A ~40% reduction in employee compensation to source 6T, globally, seems a little more plausible.
Clearly, I'm eliding a ton of complexity/nuance.
Because spend on "enterprise productivity tooling" (or whatever category they want to place AI spend in) can now increasingly offset human labor cost.
AI is not a replacement for powerpoint and excel. You can't substitute those.
White collar worker salaries is ~$30T+ global.
This "productivity" gain changes nothing. Software already optimized most of it in the past 20 years, the gains now are marginal, at best incremental.
My point was that AI isn't some productivity software thing. The addressable market is white collar work that can be done on a computer.
You think its implausible for AI to replace some fraction of white collar workers? To me this is directionally exactly where this is heading?
As far as I can tell, it won't even accelerate a competitor who could bite off a piece of that. As far as I can tell, it won't even make the suite itself better, just buggier. Maybe MS themselves could fire %15 to %30 of the people who work on Office, but these companies have been vastly overhiring for years; they could have done that 10 years ago and they didn't.
- AI hype-mongers. We've dealt with these for decades in academia and industry, through countless boom/bust cycles. Yes, there's progress, but reality is boring and selective.
- Tech Bros. NFTs? The MeTaVeRsE? The CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and SpaceX have proven repeatedly to be dishonest grifters chasing all and only money. They're like the tobacco industry of laughably dishonest at this point (and consistently wrong).
- Singularity grifters. The Kurzweil cultists flooding the ranks of lesswrong feel suddenly emboldened. They've been issuing batshit proclamations and navel gazing about AI alignment to anyone who will pay attention to them (and write them a check) for decades. It's no more connected to reality now than it was then.
- The LinkedIn hivemind. If you aren't transforming your organization to meet the new GenAI future, your company is BEHIND and you are FAILING AS A LEADER. Be the one firing white collar workers, not the one being fired. Make sure you look good on paper with bullshit performative AI initiatives or your ass is dust. Oh, no ROI? No problem. Read my book on NAVIGATING THE ENTERPRISE AI TRANSFORMATION. It's skin-deep and filled with empty platitudes and clip art, but it will make you look like a big brave tech leader, just like Steve Jobs or Dario.
- Investors. Yes, we're in a bubble. Yes, we've been in a bubble before. Yes, it's going to pop. Yes, that's going to be bad. Really bad, probably. Remember the financial crisis? Investors don't. And this time, there won't be a deep-pocketed government to bail anyone out, because debt is already sky-high and we're still recovering from COVID.
So while I get there's something there, and I'm keeping abreast of it and extracting the best and leaving the worst, it is an exhaustingly negative experience. My guard is up and I have absolutely run out of patience for bullshit. It's not funny or smart or interesting. It's not even fun to complain about. The forces in the mix are awful and I don't want anything to do with them.
because AI is gonna make them so much more productive of course. /s
productivity tooling replaces employees
Hard to see how Google or Facebook keeps their advertising models in that environment. There aren't enough construction workers and data scientists to buy everything.
which yes, will completely destroy the consumer economy and social structures and current forms of governance
There will be, when two third of the office workers will be replaced by AI.
It is astounding why so many people does not understand how consumer economy works. I think it is more a matter of the copium, because, well, it is generally hard to accept the truth that in five years you will have to haul bricks as a job, and the guy who used to put that bricks on one another and make three times less than you in your tech job now will be your new boss.
And advertising models in that environment? Why should something changed for it?
Who re these people?
Warehouse and factory labor is the next largest market for AI/robotics, at about $7T/year globally.
The bubble question is really about the target year. Will these companies start on a trajectory where AI begins eating these massive markets before investors lose faith?
To me it looks like one of these is true:
(1) this is indeed a bubble, and AI will turn into a useful tool integrated into everything but fall short of expectations. We'll see some significant multiple compression in the share prices of these core AI companies, but they'll remain good investments in the long term.
(2) this is a real transformation, the investment was worth it, and these companies will earn massive revenue while causing Depression-era levels of unemployment (24% if half of knowledge workers and factory/warehouse workers can get jobs).
Basically, the revenue required to justify the infra spend requires that they start eating existing industries, because that's certainly not going to come from ChatGPT/Claude subscriptions.
I think there's a kind of arrogance involved here in how they value what "knowledge workers" do. On the the outside they see some documents written, spreadhsheets filled out, forms submitted, emails sent and conclude AI could do all of that.
It's true AI can do a lot of the mechanics of it, but the assumption that there is nothing beyond the pure mechanics of it to me is highly untested and history would bet against it. Some significant part of it sits genuinely within the human relationship component that is almost definitionally not doable by a computer.
Claude for finance etc - long list of products that are barely a value add and in some cases value destructive.
Ironically the only hard thing they’ve landed on that generates revenue is Code - the one thing they’re supposed to understand deeply lol!
There are so many people who have never used Claude Code or Codex who think that Google's AI results are representative of what AI can do.
> Bain forecasts that annual spending on AI infrastructure might hit $1.5 trillion by 2031.
So maybe in 5yrs it will need enough revenue to cover $1.5T in capex spend globally in a year, investments which as the article mentions is also being supported by governments in "the UAE, Saudi Arabia, the EU, South Korea and the US". ... Or spending growth could lower over the next couple years to be more realistic.
The obvious trend is investments will come back to earth over the next year or so. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are clearly laying down the PR groundwork to slow down model releases.
The value in Bain projecting such a growth over 5yrs is mostly help to communicate this. Not that it's actually going to continue growing exponentially with zero regard for revenue.
I think their claim they can make, assuming their evidence is true, is
"AI needs $6T in annual revenue for every investment in AI to be profitable"
I think some people will make a lot of money and more people will lose a lot of money.
Most of those investing know this, they are taking the risk of losing a lot to attempt to be one of the ones that make a lot.
A lot of early internet tech companies went bust, a few became extremely successful. At the time I would see high valuations and ask "Yes, but how do they make money". Most of those with an unclear answer to that question are not around now. The ones who had a tangible plan to make money, even if they were making a loss at the time, tended to survive.
There is a lot of Dumb money going into AI, when that is the dumb money of wealthy individuals, I am more than happy to let them receive no return while paying for infrastructure. There's a problem when the dumb money comes from dumb individuals who are routing money from others who do not have a say in how it gets invested.
That is not an AI specific problem, that is a problem where people can make decisions where others carry the risk without their consent. That is the problem that needs to be met head on.
---
Yeah, this is exactly right. The numbers look impossible because they _are_ impossible. The _vast majority_ of AI spend is wasted and the vast majority of AI companies are going to go bankrupt. There are _still_ going to be unimaginable amounts of wealth earned by the survivors.
I don't think this part is correct. It is spent on things. There will be a quantity that will go training models that do not contribute research data or active use that you could say that the resources were wasted. If the money is spent on infrastructure or the resulting models found active use (or provided research insights) then I don't think you can say that the money has been wasted.
I think a large proportion of the advances in AI that have come in the last year have come from being able to see the models from the previous year in action.
That does not guarantee that money will be returned to investors, Just that it wasn't wasted.
What happens when the adoption of AI destroys the middle 60% of the bell curve of programmers and technologists? How will the middle class of people spend money on products/services if they don’t have a job?
We can’t both create wealth and destroy jobs with nothing to replace them.
America has little to no manufacturing base.
Technology and finance has been its differentiator economically speaking for job creation. Both are at risk from AI adoption. Businesses have to sell to someone, and at the moment it’s not clear — if the stated goals of revenue are to be believed, how that can happen.
Consumer-focused services, which includes subscriptions and advertising revenue, is seen to contribute $200 billion to $400 billion
So not $6T of ARR subscription sales, but $6T of "economic enablement". By 2031, the global economy is estimated to add another $40T of economic activity to GDP. So AI needs to account for 15% of that.
OTOH, this price crash will increase demand for inference. Maybe some data centres will go bankrupt, but the scavengers won't be selling off used TPU's for cheap, they'll operate those data centers to sell you tokens for cheap.
No. The vast majority of SWE are not going back to 'hand coding' so this will not happen.
I agree its not on the same level as the internet/electricity but its been quite a lot more impactful than you are giving it credit for, and that has only been increasing over time.
The old "Mythical Man Month" might apply here. Throwing bigger swarms of agents at things and making bigger projects may not lead to more progress and usefulness.
Often it's the small, insightful, well-crafted thing that goes much further than 100 decent projects. Git was a little tool written on a weekend and it went a lot further than giant projects written by giant teams.
Reason I ask is sure, you did this but since few people are paying true cost, if prices rises by 10x, is it still worth it?
Dont talk LoC. Talk about projects.
Currently, hyperscalers are growing revenues at an impressive annual rate (~20%), which comfortably covers current annual CapEx. While traditional cloud services still drive a large share of this growth, AI services are becoming an increasingly material contributor. So far, so good.
However, the real question is whether a market actually exists to sustain this CapEx spending at scale relative to revenue growth. The current CapEx growth rate (~50%+ year-over-year) has already outstripped revenue growth, and no one truly knows where the trillions in required future revenue will come from.
If this projected revenue growth fails to materialize, tech equities face severe re-rating risk, given that current stock valuations have already priced in these best-case expectations. A market crash unless a real market is discovered.
In summary, nothing new—perhaps just another red flag.
I don't care how good AI is at something like software development or whatever task. If customers were paying real prices for usage would any of us be using it?
Any data out there on how far off enterprise API pricing is from actual compute COGS for these models right now?
$6 trillion a year / 195+366m = $900 a month, from the guy flipping burgers to the hedge fund manager. Average salary is in the region of $5000 a month, pre-tax.
I love AI, spend my evening clauding. But still. Call me a sceptic on paying $1000 a month.
*https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2026/09/22/how-americ...
2. Global GDP will be ~$165T by 2031
3. This is not $6T of ChatGPT subscription revenue. The article actually specifically says of the $6T, $200-$400B would be subscription and AI app revenue in 2031.
4. The $6T figure is AI "economic enablement". Drugs, robotics, research, coding, manufacturing, materials, etc...
> 2. Global GDP will be ~$165T by 2031
But GDP is a very different thing than payrolls.
His latest newsletter (from today) also talks about this: https://www.wheresyoured.at/dead-money/
“Being right at the wrong time is as good as being wrong” - Howard Marx
What you consider “losing money” I might consider “choosing not to participate in an ongoing global financial scam at the cost of my retirement growing slightly slower for a while”.
Why doesn't he put money where his mouth is?
I don’t even disagree with some or even a lot of his takes, it’s just he is singularly a content generator with a track to run on. Look at his previous work, it’s much of the same kind of attempts at being relevant. To me he’s nothing more than a drive time radio host, shouting about something just to fill the air
Just for fun, I'll join in myself and make two bold half-hearted predictions that will surely be wrong:
- Zitron is wrong about the details, but right about the ultimate fate of the AI companies. Turns out AI is useful after all, it just isn't able to justify trillions of dollars in expenses. Shit falls through hard. Probably not an AI winter, but more like the dotcom bubble, as many have already predicted for years. Everything looks rosey right up until the first domino falls.
- The AI safety doomers are right, just not any time soon. Turns out our depth of understanding what intelligence really means was severely lacking; it's hard to quantify and we never had so many things testing it. Eventually, we really do discover why LLMs emergent capabilities really are inherently limited in ways that just make their ability to meaningfully "escape" less scary, and maybe architectures emerge without these limitations, just not yet. The fight with LLMs and malicious use winds up looking a lot more like a supercharged version of the current fights we have with dumber bots. Everyone winds up having to fight LLMs with LLMs, and this new world eventually pushes both good and bad new legislation in its wake, finally actually pushing responsibility for AI misfires, but probably in a way that is at least as bad as it is good, creating chilling effects and harming competition unnecessarily, because that's just how things go. Maybe we eventually do crack true super intelligence where it's a full superset of human mental facilities, and then geopolitics maybe gets as interesting as it ever has been in history. Probably not in a way that is fun for people living through it.
I can't blame Zitron. It's fun to pretend to be able to predict the future. I still broadly agree that the financials don't really seem to make that much sense even if he clearly keeps getting the details wrong.
I don't think that nobody seems to mind that. Pro-AI people make fun of doomers because of their failed predictions of apocalypse at least since GPT-2 days.
https://danluu.com/zitron/
I kinda hope corpos with a bunch of money and plenty of normies adopt AI so developers don't get bled (as) dry, esp. given the recent OpenAI changes which I feel like Anthropic is soon to follow.
Edit: explanation of the downvotes would be nice. Dan Luu made a fairly factual article there that explores some of Zitron's claims. And personally I don't see how it's bad to wish for wider adoption of AI so the big orgs get their fill of profit (since enough inference could help fund R&D better) and developers don't have to bear that burden.
This way we know that $6T is properly accounting for all the inherent economic collapse happening _right now_.
I guess either we get human level AGI so it can do human like jobs, or they'll have to trim those plans a good bit?
Chatgptd emails are not adding value anywhere
Very few professions if any get anything remotely like the value coders get from LLMs right now Maybe lawyers or doctors but it's just way too risky error wise A comma off in a legal doc can end your career
A perfect ouroboros.
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/540
like in the good old days
Models are getting cheaper, and more efficient, but I don't see how they cross the threshold of full autonomous intelligence in the way that an employee needs to be fully accountable for their actions.
the demand then will rise and prices will rise in tandem
it is of course possible that 'deep learning hits a wall' and they don't get there, but i wouldn't bet on it