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Comment by selfhoster11 | Hacker News Reader

They already are paying off. The nature of LLMs means that they will require expensive, fast hardware that's a large capex.

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They aren’t yet because the big providers that paid for all of this GPU capacity aren’t profitable yet.

They continually leap frog each other and shift around customers which indicates that the current capacity is already higher than what is required for what people actually pay for.

Google, Amazon, and Microsoft aren’t profitable?

I assume the reference was AI use cases are not profitable. Those companies are subsidizing and OpenAI/grok are burning money.

Google, Amazon, and Microsoft do a lot of things that aren't profitable in themselves. There is no reason to believe a company will kill a product line just because it makes a loss. There are plenty of other reasons to keep it running.

I didn't imply anything about what big-tech would do.

Yeah but OpenAI is adding ads this year for the free versions, which I'm guessing is most of their users. They are probably hedging on taking a big slice of Google's advertising monopoly-pie (which is why Google is also now all-in on forcing Gemini opt-out on every product they own, they can see the writing on the wall).

Aren't all Microsoft products OpenAI based? OpenAI has always been burning money.

Do you think it's odd you only listed companies with already existing revenue streams and not companies that started with and only have generative algos as their product?

How many business units have Google and Microsoft shut down or ceased investment for being unprofitable?

I hear Meta is having massive VR division layoffs…who could have predicted?

Raw popularity does not guarantee sustainability. See: Vine, WeWork, MoviePass.

Where? Who’s in the black?

The users.

Ehhhhhhh

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