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Comment on Sam Altman: “$30k to get a simple iPhone app created, $300 for a plumbing job”

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I have no idea what he is trying to say. That the $30K iPhone app is too expensive? That the prices of the two jobs will diverge more over the next five years? Or the reverse?

I think he is trying to suggest --

Building a iPhone app will become relatively cheaper (in context of current trends like ChatGPT and Copilot contributing to drastic improvements in developer productivity)

Physical labor and skills (that today's tech is not on the verge of disrupting) will remain in demand and become relatively more expensive to procure.

So he seems to be predicting a kind of reversal of these data points in near future.

Personally I agree with other comments here that say these two are not comparable. A $300 plumbing job today is probably more like a bug fix in software terms (a bug fix being much cheaper than $30K , may even be less than $300 already) rather than a full app build.

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