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> “Amazon might be a good analogy here. I'm old enough to remember when Amazon absorbed billions of VC money, making losses year over year. Every day there was some new article about how insane it was.”

Not to take away from the rest of your points, but I thought Amazon only raised $8m in 1995 before their IPO in 1997. Very little venture capital by today’s standard.

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That caught my eye too, because VCs never poured "billions" into any one company pre-dot-com bust. Unicorns were notable for being valued at $1B or more, but never raised that much in funding, and this only happened much later, a decade and a half after Amazons IPO - Amazon itself was never a unicorn, its post-IPO capitalization was $300M.

Amazon is famous for making losses after being publicly listed. Also, it was remiss of grandparent to not note that Amazon's losses were intentional for the sake of growth. OpenAI has no such excuse: their losses are just so that they stay in the game; if they attempted to turn profitable today, they'd be insolvent within months.

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