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Comment by pards | Hacker News Reader

> Take away the agent, and Bob is still a first-year student who hasn't started yet. The year happened around him but not inside him. He shipped a product, but he didn't learn a trade.

We're minting an entire generation of people completely dependent on VC funding. What happens if/when the AI companies fail to find a path to profitability and the VC funding dries up?

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What will happen is pretty obvious. Those companies will either be classified as too important to fail and get government support or go bankrupt and will be bought for pennies on the dollar. For the customers nothing much will change since tokens are getting cheaper every year and the business is already pretty profitable. Progress will slow down massively till local open weight models catch up to pre-crash SotA and go on from there.

> the business is already pretty profitable

As of March 2026, OpenAI generates annual revenue exceeding $12 billion. However, the costs of running ChatGPT are around $17 billion a year.

Source: https://searchlab.nl/en/statistics/chatgpt-statistics-2026

Big improvement I remember when they were spending billions and getting no profit.

Do you think that'll take a generation to happen?

ChatGPT 3.5 came out coming on 4 years ago now. I don't think a human generation (~20-30 years) needs to be the benchmark here, but new juniors in the industry for a handful of years can be said to be a whole "generation". That how I was reading OP.

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