Generally, I worry HN is in a dark place with this stuff - look how this thread goes, ex. descendant of yours is at "Why would I ever pay for this when it hallucinates." I don't understand how you can be a software engineer and afford to have opinions like that. I'm worried for those who do, genuinely, I hope transitions out there are slow enough, due to obstinance, that they're not cast out suddenly without the skills to get something else.
It's subsidised by VC funding. At some point the gravy train stops and they have to pivot to profit so that the VCs deliver return-on-investment. Look at Facebook shoving in adverts, Uber jacking up the price, etc.
> I don't understand how you can be a software engineer and afford to have opinions like that
I don't know how you can afford not to realise that there's a fixed value prop here for the current behaviour and that it's potentially not as high as it needs to be for OpenAI to turn a profit.
OpenAI's ridiculous investment ability is based on a future potential it probably will never hit. Assuming it does not, the whole stack of cards falls down real quick.
(You can Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V OpenAI for all the big AI providers)
If that's what you meant: Google. Boom.
Also, perhaps you're a bit new to industry, but that's how these things go. They burn a lot of capital building it out b/c they can always fire everyone and just serve at cost -- i.e. subsidizing business development is different from subsiziding inference, unless you're just sort of confused and angry at the whole situation and it all collapses into everyone's losing money and no one will admit it.
From the article: > OpenAI faces questions about how it plans to meet its commitments to spend $1.4tn on AI infrastructure over the next eight years.
Someone needs to pay for that 1.4 trillion, that's 2/3 of what Microsoft makes this year. If you think they'll make that from revenue, that's fine. I don't. And that's just the infra.
Also, the leaked numbers being sent to Ed Zitron suggest that even inferencing is underwater on a cost basis, at least for OpenAI. I know Anthropic claims otherwise for themselves.