The most important question in financial markets can be put thus: will companies like JPMorgan Chase and Walmart find artificial-intelligence models useful enough to buy them at a price such that OpenAI and Anthropic can stay in business? If they do: rock ’n’ roll(摇滚乐（比喻一切顺利）). If not, investors will tire of funnelling(输送、注入（资金）) capital into the AI model-makers, thereby destroying confidence in the vast construction of data centres, and the semiconductors and gas turbines that power them, and so on into economic oblivion(被遗忘、湮没（经济崩溃）).
金融市场最重要的问题可以这样表述：像摩根大通和沃尔玛这样的公司会觉得人工智能模型足够有用，愿意以某个价格购买它们，使得OpenAI和Anthropic能够继续运营吗？如果会，那就太好了。如果不会，投资者将厌倦向AI模型制造商输送资本，从而破坏对数据中心这个庞大建设以及为其提供动力的半导体和燃气轮机的信心，如此便会导致经济崩溃。
Last year the answer was obvious, at least in Silicon Valley. The back-bending labour of office workers in the 21st century would soon go the way of(步……后尘，重蹈覆辙) the back-breaking tasks of the 20th. Which is to say it would disappear, but this time into computers rather than offshore: firms would buy tokens, not workers. The messianic(救世主般的、狂热的) confidence of tech bosses on this point has made them unpopular but not yet profitable. Partly it reflects their faith in the technology. But it also reflects a view of office work formed in the early 2020s, when tech firms hired vast numbers of paper-pushers(文书工作者、办事员) whose emails, dashboards and coffee-chats their “technical” staff despised. Since then the “bullshit jobs(狗屁工作（无意义工作）)” view of the world has simply given way to(让位于、被取代) one about “bullshit tasks”.
去年答案很明确，至少在硅谷是如此。21世纪白领的弯腰劳动很快将步20世纪重体力劳动的后尘。也就是说，它们会消失，但这次是进入计算机而不是离岸外包：企业将购买计算单元，而不是劳动力。科技老板们在这点上的救世主式自信让他们不受欢迎但尚未盈利。部分原因在于他们对技术的信念。但这也反映了在2020年代初形成的对办公室工作的看法，当时科技公司雇佣了大量的“文书推手”，他们的电子邮件、仪表板和咖啡闲聊都被“技术”人员看不起。自那时起，“狗屁工作”的世界观已经让位给了“狗屁任务”的世界观。
Yet the war on white-collar work has progressed far more slowly than techies(科技人员（口语）) anticipated. The information that constitutes modern companies is not easily organised and fed into AI models. The answers the models spit out(吐出（数据、答案）) are not easily acted on, either. How, for example, should a firm decide which tasks to automate? When should it use cheap open-source models rather than pricey cutting-edge ones? How should it calculate the returns on its investments? Can it hedge the cost of tokens? Answering these questions is arduous(艰巨的、费力的) and possibly very lucrative(利润丰厚的、赚钱的) work. Hence the idea—simple, elegant and brilliantly ironic—that model-makers should become much more involved in how their inventions are used. The bullish case(看涨论点、乐观情景) works like this: companies get more out of AI; model-makers solve their existential cashflow problems; the world economy marches happily on.
然而，对白领工作的战争进展远比科技人预期得慢。构成现代公司的信息不容易被整理并输入AI模型。模型吐出的答案也不容易付诸行动。例如，一家公司应该如何决定自动化哪些任务？何时使用廉价的开源模型而不是昂贵的前沿模型？如何计算投资回报？它能否对冲代币成本？回答这些问题是一项艰巨且可能利润丰厚的工作。因此有了一个简单、优雅且极具讽刺意味的想法：模型制造商应该更多地参与其发明的使用方式。看涨的逻辑是这样：公司从AI中获得更多；模型制造商解决其生存性的现金流问题；世界经济愉快地前行。
Model students
模范学生