Comment by ADeerAppeared | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ADeerAppeared | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Meanwhile, no one answers this because they are getting value.

You're literally doing the same thing you're accusing of. Every HN thread is full of AI boosters claiming AI to be the future with no backing evidence.

Riddle me this. If all these people are "getting value", why are all these companies losing horrendous amounts of money? Why has nobody figured out how to be profitable?

> Please take the time to learn, it will give you value.

Yeah, yeah, just prompt engineer harder. That'll make the stochastic parrot useful. Anyone who has criticism just does so because they're dumb and you're smart. Same as it always was. Everyone opposed to the metaverse just didn't get it bro. You didn't get NFTs bro. You didn't get blockchain bro.

None of these previous bubbles had money in it (beyond scamming idiots), if AI wants to prove it's not another empty tech bubble, pay up. Show me the money. Should be easy, if it's automating so many expensive man-hours of labour. People would be lining up to pay OpenAI.

There’s clearly some value. People are paying for something.

> AI start-ups generate money faster than past hyped tech companies

https://www.ft.com/content/a9a192e3-bfbc-461e-a4f3-112e63d0b...

> Riddle me this. If all these people are "getting value", why are all these companies losing horrendous amounts of money? Why has nobody figured out how to be profitable?

While I agree that LLMs are not currently working great for most envisioned use cases; this premise here is not a good argument. Large LLM providers are not trying to be profitable at the moment. They’re trying to grow and that’s pretty sensible.

Uber was the poster child of this, and for all its mockery, Uber is now an unqualified profitable company.

I'm not sure I would call incinerating 11b dollars a year to the point where you need to do one of the biggest raises ever and it doesn't even buy you a year of runway sensible.

Based on their forecasts it’s still pretty sensible. I don’t personally believe the forecasts are sensible. But that’s besides the point.

Think of all the search engines alltheweb, yahoo, astalavista,... where sooo much money got poored in, and finally there was just one winner taking it all. That's the race openai is trying to win now. The competition is fierce and we can just play with all kinds of models for free and we do nothing but complaining.

> Why has nobody figured out how to be profitable?

From what I've seen claimed about OpenAI finances, this is easy: It's a Red Queen's race — "it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place".

If their financial position was as simple as "we run this API, we charge X, the running cost is Y", then they're already at X > Y.

But if that was all OpenAI were actually doing, they'd have stopped developing new versions or making the existing models more efficient some time back, while the rest of the industry kept improving their models and lowering their prices, and they'd be irrelevant.

> People would be lining up to pay OpenAI.

They are.

Not that this is either sufficient or necessary to actually guarantees anything about real value. For lack of sufficiency: people collectively paid a lot for cryptocurrencies and NFTs, too (and before then and outside tech, homeopathic tinctures and sub-prime mortgages); For lack of necessity: there's plenty of free-to-download models.

I get a huge benefit even just from the free chat models. I could afford to pay for better models, but why bother when free is so good? Every time a new model comes out, the old paid option becomes the new free option.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com