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Comment by bwy | Hacker News Reader

I think you're wrong, in the same way that folks on HN were wrong about Dropbox–HN: why would I pay for something that provides so little value, it's just slightly more convenient file storage?

Just because open source models are almost as good, doesn't mean you can underestimate the convenience factor.

Both can be true: we're in an AI bubble, and the large incumbents will capture most of the value/be difficult to unseat.

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On the other hand, no one has figured out how to make money providing AI yet, and everyone's operating at a loss. At some point they're going to need to monetize, and the cost/convenience compared to alternatives may not be worth it for a lot of people.

At one point you could get a Netflix subscription and it was convenient enough that people were pirating less. Now there's so many subscription services, we're basically back to cable packages, paying ever increasing amounts and potentially still seeing ads. I know I'm pirating a lot more again.

Uber vs cabs, Airbnb vs hotels - We've seen it time and time again, once the VC cashflow/infinite stonk growth dries up and they need to figure out how to monetize, the service becomes worse and people start looking for alternatives again.

Yeah, but not just that. I don't expect my mum to go find some high end consumer GPU and install it on a home server in order to run her own local LLM. I expect that people will be throwing chat interfaces running remixed versions of open weight models out on the internet so fast that it's impossible for anyone to monitise it in a reasonable way.

I also wonder whether, similar to bitcoin mining, these things end up on specialist ASICS and before we know it a medium tier mobile phone is running your own local models.

A top end iphone is capable of running smaller local LLMs today.

A few days late but the cheapest, base model iPhone, the 16e runs Apple Intelligence too

(Unfortunately... only Apple Intelligence right now...)

I don't have a newer iphone to run it on, so I don’t have a specific one to recommend but searching for local LLM in the App Store gives plenty of options so you’re not limited to Apple Intelligence models.

Well seeing how Dropbox is doing now, Steve Jobs was right - it isn’t a product, it’s a feature. For the same price of 2TB of storage on Dropbox you can get the same amount on Google or OneDrive with a full office suite.

People love to quote Dropbox ignoring all of the YC companies that are zombies or outright failed. Just looking at the ones that have gone public.

https://medium.com/@Arakunrin/the-post-ipo-performance-of-y-...

Public...? Oh, you mean the ones meant to be left holding the bag.

When there's real money to be made investing in YC is off limits to the public: https://jaredheyman.medium.com/on-the-176-annual-return-of-a...

I am not saying the companies in aggregate don’t lead to successful outcomes for VCs. I am saying claiming Dropbox is a shining example of a “successful” company that HN was wrong about long term doesn’t jibe with reality.

They also didn’t have the massive fixed cost outlays nor did they have negative unit economics that OpenAI has.

I don't get this comparison. The non-Dropbox version was magnitudes less convenient to 99.99% of the population. A non-OpenAI chat interface is, at best, a fracfion less convenient.

A good number of people used to pay for email. Now a tiny fraction does. It all hangs on wbether OpenAI can figure out how to get ad revenue without people moving to a free competitor without them - and there will be plenty of those.

Does it have to be ads? :/

Of course, as that's where the money and power is, the only things SamA is in it for.

There will be equivalent models that are free. Likely, there will even be free ones without ads.

Free+ads can beat free without ads on pure incumbency, marketing and convenience. Most people don't use an adblocker, even though it's trivially easy to install.

Paid, however, can't beat free+ads. Too much friction.

> folks on HN were wrong about Dropbox–HN: why would I pay for something that provides so little value, it's just slightly more convenient file storage?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42392302

(Before discussion of your comment devolves into nonsense about this.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com