Comment by kllrnohj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kllrnohj | Hacker News Reader

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> Eg. At my company we have 100x more demand than we can get capacity for, and we’re barely getting started. We have a roadmap with 1000x+ the current demand and we’re a relatively small company.

OpenAI's revenue is $13bn with 70% of that coming from people just spending $20/mo to talk to ChatGPT. Anthropic is projecting $9bn in revenue in 2025. For nice cold splash of reality, fucking Arizona Iced Tea has $3bn in revenue (also that's actual revenue not ARR)

You might have 100x more demand than you can get capacity for, but if that 100x still puts you at a number that in absolute terms is small, it's not very impressive. Similarly if you're already not profitable and achieving 100x growth requires 1,000x in spend, that's also not a recipe for success. In fact it's a recipe for going bankrupt in a hurry.

I have no idea if OpenAI’s valuation is reasonable. All I’m saying is I’m convinced the demand is there, even without AGI around the corner. You do not need AGI to transform countless industries.

And we are profitable on our AI efforts while adding massive value to our clients.

I know less about OpenAI’s economics, I know there are questions on whether their model is sustainable/for how long. I am guessing they are thinking about it and have a plan?

This is correct, it should burn the retinas of anyone thinking that OAI or Anthropic are in any way worth their multi-billion dollar valuations. I liked AK’s analysis of AI for coding here (it’s overly defensive, lacks style and functionality awareness, is a cargo cultist, and/or just does it wrong a lot) but autocomplete itself is super valuable, as is the ability to generate simple frontend code and let you solve the problem of making a user interface without needing a team of people with those in-house skills.

There are many more use cases that aren't fully realised yet. With regards to coding, LLMs have shortcomings. However, there's a lot of work that can be automated. Any work that requires interaction with a computer can eventually be automated to some extent. To what extent is something only time can tell.

Sure, but you don’t need AI to automate computer work. You can make a career out of formalizing the kinds of excel-jockeying that people do for reports or data entry

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