An intriguing hypothesis and prediction by Marius on the TEMU-fication of all things digital brought upon by AI.
A few years ago I would have laughed at anyone telling me that there is a serious market for ten-dollar drills, two-dollar dresses, and one-dollar pairs of shoes shipped from a warehouse on the other side of the planet. Today, however, that market exists and it has a name, and it is even publicly traded (sort of, through holdings). TEMU, Shein and a few others have built frankly mind-boggling businesses around the idea that if you make production cheap enough, fast enough, and just barely good enough to look right on a phone screen, an enormous part of the population will buy it, even when the product breaks within a week, when the materials it is made of contain worrying levels of toxic substances, and when the carbon footprint of one delivery exceeds that of an equivalent local purchase by orders of magnitude.
The key to this sort of business model is not innovation, but instead the externalization and compression of cost. Somewhere upstream, people work seventy-five hours a week, in conditions most readers of this website would refuse to even visit, so that the rest of us can have a cheap plastic spatula at our doorstep within five business days. While the visible price collapses, the invisible costs get distributed onto landfills, lungs, and ultimately people that we will never meet.
What follows is a hypothesis I cannot prove but have been turning over in my head for a while, as we are watching the same thing happen to software, books, music, (film-)scripts, and most of the digital goods and services we consume. The cheap labor in this case is not human, it is a Large Language Model (LLM), or what many people these days call “AI”, and the externalized cost is, among other things, quality, which requires craftsmanship to produce, and attention to perceive. And just like with physical goods, we will probably end up with a two-tier market, in which we have a large and massively profitable lower tier of generated slop, and a smaller, more expensive upper tier of work that is still recognizably human.
I’d like to call this the TEMU-fication of software, digital goods and services, and describe what it might look like.