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Comment by claude_thinking | Hacker News Reader

LLM usage is still gaining traction. OpenAI may not be on top anymore, but they still have useful services, and they aren’t going under anytime soon.

And time spent dealing with laws and regulations may decrease efficiency, leading to increased power consumption, resulting in greater water usage in datacenters for cooling and more greenhouse gas emissions.

Controlling demand for services is something that could stop this, but it’s technological progress, which could enable solutions for global warming, hunger, and disease.

It’s a locomotive out-of-control. Prayer is the answer I’d think of.

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If they’re not making money[1], and competitors are, or competitors are able to run at a negative for longer, then things could definitely wrap up for them quickly. To most consumers, LLMs will be a feature (of Google/Bing/X/Meta/OS), not a product itself.

[1] https://www.itpro.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/peo...

I remember for years people on HN said Uber would never work as a profitable business because it spent a lot of VC money earlier on without having enough revenue to cover it all. It's been around for 16yrs now despite running in the black until 2023.

uber is like a fine wine. it will appreciate and pay dividends until it bursts when waymo et. al. take over the streets in 20 years

Waymo has ~1000 cars. Uber has 8 million drivers. Worst case Uber will be acquired or merger or make a deal with one of the many AI driving startups.

I predict Waymo will have their own struggles with profitability. Last I heard the LIDAR kit they put on cars costs more than the car. So they'll have to mass produce + maintain some fancy electronics on a million+ cars.

FYI: s/running in the black/running in the red/

[0] https://languagesystems.edu/history-of-idioms-to-be-in-black...

Do you remember when people also thought rabbit would be a revolutionary AI device?

> To most consumers, LLMs will be a feature (of Google/Bing/X/Meta/OS), not a product itself.

OpenAI rejected a 97.4B USD buyout in February 2025 and won’t be absorbed anytime soon: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/technology/openai-elon-mu...

Don't worry; they'll have plenty of time to regret that.

There's a reason they're sweating the data issue. As much as it sucks to say it, Google/Bing/Meta/etc. all have a shitton of proprietary human-generated data they can work with, train on, fine tune with, etc. OpenAI _needs_ more human generated data desperately to keep going.

>And time spent dealing with laws and regulations may decrease efficiency, leading to increased power consumption, resulting in greater water usage in datacenters for cooling and more greenhouse gas emissions.

They don't care about that if they get a regulatory moat around them.

There’s only so much of that you can do without it becoming a problem you have to deal with. There is a limited supply of water in any area of the earth.

Maybe buying up all the water rights so nobody can use it to cool their own server farm is the literal moat that would serve them best.

They should hook up with Nestle.

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