It's basically a money transfer from the average person to the poor richest person on the planet.
The true Great Filter is mental illness, apparently.
The IPO will hand those heavy debt bags to the public.
We have 0 proof that selling shovels is a sustainable business strategy since none of the gold prospectors are bold enough to publish GAAP + audited financial numbers.
Right now we have lots of people spending lots of money at the lower layers and none of the end-game companies, the ones selling to actual customers, private or companies, publishing any quarterly or yearly numbers that show that the end-state of current LLMs is profitability.
Keep in mind that Nvidia, Azure, AWS can't really pivot to something else once they can't stop selling shovels. Nvidia goes back to being a $10bn company selling GPUs to gamers and Azure/AWS probably see their earnings drop by a quarter or more if the AI bubble pops. At least shovel sellers during the gold rushes could cash in and invest in land or cattle or something and have long term sustainability.
I wonder how much better Anthropic is doing.
I wouldn't bet on either Anthropic or OpenAI being profitable, we'll find out soon enough what this house of cards has inside, as they both want to IPO.
Though with the current US administration, as proven by the SpaceX IPO, laws are mere recommendations.
> While I wouldn’t say this is cooking the books, it’s definitely a shiatsu-grade massaging of the numbers. Anthropic has deliberately leaked a quarterly “profit” where it knows it can suppress its costs
https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropics-profitability-swindle...
It turns out, there are many ways to skin a financial cat.
Are they breaking laws?
Is it a loaded question? If you ask and I reply with a curt "no" and you vanish back into the ether without replying, what does that gain both of us as well as anyone that reads these comments later?
To your point, I'm both not a lawyer and based on what I've read/seen, no, they aren't breaking any laws. But what they're doing is overall very shady.
Fairly sure most of what banks did during the 2008 GFC wasn't illegal either, until we made it illegal. Robbing banks in Minnesota wasn't illegal in Illinois, either, until we made it illegal. Allowing the Titanic to leave with life-rafts for only 50% of its maximum capacity wasn't illegal either, until we made it illegal.