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Comment by otabdeveloper4 | Hacker News Reader

> have incredible commercial potential

That assertion is unsupported and unproven.

Also, if a commercial use for LLMs is ever found, it will be in the local, personal computing market, not the "cloud".

It's actually completely been disproven, Open"AI" is burning over ten billion a quarter in net losses. It has no commercial value.

To play the Devil's advocate, OpenAI actually has hundreds of millions in income, even though they are spending far more in training new models.

The issue is, as it stands, LLMs are going to become a commodity. Could that happen and OAI is still a valuable firm? Maybe. Do I personally think OpenAI has the product prowess to pull it off? Nah, I think they are overly-concentrated with technologists (same problem Google has). Apple is still king when it comes to figuring out the ideal form of the product the buyer desires.

Apple can take a future OSS model and produce the winning product. That truth would be very bitter for many to swallow. Cook maintaining good relations with China could be the thing that makes Apple topple everyone in the long-run.

> has hundreds of millions in income

By selling a dollar for ninety cents? This metric is meaningless.

Aren’t LLMs being used by business successfully in many “unsexy” domains like translation, sentiment analysis, and image recognition?

Though I do agree that many of the breathless claims that you can stop hiring or even layoff developers because of LLMs seem unsubstantiated

I wouldn't characterize that as “incredible commercial potential”. And especially in the case of translation, you save some of money, but also get poorer quality.

Speaking from experience I was recently in a tiny fountain pen shop in Sendai[0] where the owner doesn’t speak English and I don’t speak Japanese but we were able to talk for an hour or more about fountain pens and tomoe river paper alternatives using Google translate’s dialogue feature.

Maybe not massive commercial potential but it was pretty amazing and reminded me a bit of the Babel fish which use to seem like impossible sci-fi

[0]: https://share.google/64xTBRThXcFR72r3G

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