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Comment by blharr | Hacker News Reader

a hugely rambling article, and I don't see how it's final thesis relates to its argument at all

> Because the AI business model relies on reducing social connections between human beings, it is not sustainable. Thus, there is the AI bubble, and it will burst.

"Because it relies on reducing social connections, i ts, not sustainable" isn't a logical argument. There's plenty of cases where reducing social connections have been sustainable enough to generate immense profits. If anything, social connections are completely antithetical to generating profit. Actual 'social' professions are often the least paid and most overworked jobs with little ability to scale.

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And author says social media companies was a positive thing. Sheeeesh.

One day I looked around me and was amazed at how many things around me got there because I clicked on buttons in online shops (vs leaving the house, going to the store, purchasing it and taking it home). Buying plane tickets? Clicks. Go to the airport, scan boarding pass (also obtained digitally), all the way to the gate where on domestic flights no one even checks for ID, no "social connection" needed.

> And author says social media companies was a positive thing. Sheeeesh.

The author never claimed it was positive as in "morally good". He said it as in "you can make good money with that".

> I don't see how it's final thesis relates to its argument at all

> Because it relies on reducing social connections, i ts , not sustainable" isn't a logical argument.

It seems like the author uses a different understanding of the term "social connections between human beings", which might be better described with "physical or virtual effect on actually existing commoners". "Social" as in "society", not as in "relationship"; "connection" as in "relation between things" aka. "is a", "has a", not as "social bonding" or "transmission channel".

I think a financial transaction or a contract counts as a social connection here.

that 95% of AI projects by corporate is so over repeated, whenever I see it I get turned off by the lack of originality of thought

Also author cites Google and FB time to profit, they are outliers and things are different now with companies staying private longer. Uber took 15 years to get cash flow positive

I don't think FB was an outlier. I can't be sure, but I don't think there were many (any?) companies that took more than 10 years to profitability pre-2015.

I think Twitter took 11 years, and it was 2017.

Uber is actually a good counterexample for more reasons than just how long it took to reach profitability. It also raised a lot of money $13B+ (compared to Facebook's ~$2B and Twitter's ~$3.5B), and ~$8B from IPO (that's another interesting fact; IPO when bleeding money).

However, it would rather make Uber an outlier, not vice versa. I guess Tesla and SpaceX fall into the "Uber" bucket, too (SpaceX would actually be profitable pre-2015, right?). How many others can you list?

So yes, we have extending timelines, but pouring money into a leaky bucket for 10 years is still predominantly a losing bet. For each that eventually made it you would have Foursquare, We Work, Better Place, Jawbone, Theranos (!), Fisker Automotive, etc.

And for each of those, you would have dozens that are even more forgotten because investors pulled the plug after just a few years (anyone remember fab.com perchance?). I would put Groupons of this world in the same bucket.

But even if we treated Uber and Tesla as the norm, OpenAI has already beaten them all in terms of how much funding it raised (and Anthropic is on its way there, too). Both with no signs of profitability round the corner and an absurd burn rate that can't be carried by any single customer group (and I already think about their geography as global).

That's why corporate results are so important, as they can afford to pay a premium. ChatGPT users will not.

So even among the wildest outliers, AI companies are extreme outliers.

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