Hacker News Reader

Comment by firemelt | Hacker News Reader

I like this one better

Funny how they include nvidia, micron, and AMD revenue as “AI revenue” and that it represents that majority of industry revenue but presumably a big chunk of everyone else’s spend. Almost might as well include electric utility revenue as AI Revenue by that metric

Oh look, the answer is the same when I looked a couple months ago. Interesting

AI is more like an ongoing research project than it is a product. GPUs are currently the product that is profitable and Nvidia will keep funding labs to keep buying GPUs.

The accounting is pretty iffy there though. Like the top line implies Amazon lost $334bn on AI but they aren't really an AI company and made a $16bn profit last quarter at AWS up 64% on the previous year. Also a larger profit as a company as a whole.

I don’t understand how they track these figures.

For example: META made a bit more than $5 bn revenue since 2022?

You almost have hope for them from the total number until you realize the vast majority of that green is made up of NVIDIA

On the other hand, people said this about Amazon, Google, Meta/Facebook, and loads of other huge tech things that are now wildly profitable.

It hasn't been a reliable predictive metric so far. All runaway growth tech sectors and businesses tend to look economically insane until they're not.

> and loads of other huge tech things that are now wildly profitable.

They also said it about loads of other huge tech things that died. Pointing at the ones that made it is literally survivor bias.

Yes, they said that about a lot of companies that dumped product until the competition was eliminated, then abused their monopoly position and resultant political connections to do whatever they wanted. Their sites are worse than ever. Literally worse than the day after launch.

This is exactly how Cloud Computing looked in 2012-2018. Dumping huge $ into computing buildout that wasn't profitable yet. All those co's: Amazon, GCP, Azure paid off immensely and are ridiculously profitable.

the same type of people will eventually hate it when AI actually starts profiting at which point they will ask for redistribution.

damned if you do.

damned if you don't.

if all of humanity's knowledge was redistributed to AI labs to sell back to us, it's only fair that some of the profits get redistributed back.

No, it wasn't. Cloud computing was almost immediately profitable.

And Amazon was famously "unprofitable" for their first 9 years because they were investing all their very real profits into a form of capital that the US tax code didn't recognize.

GCP reported its first quarterly operating profit in Q1 2023, roughly 15 years after Google began offering cloud computing.

Frontier labs are also reinvesting their tens of billions of revenue back into infra scaleout, sounds like Amazon.

If 2 of 3 were like this, and Azure numbers were never split out, want to take a guess what the economics of the third was like too?

You are being downvoted but only a few years ago Google contemplated whether to kill GCP altogether because of lack of traction in the market or revenue goals.

Yes, there exist cloud computing companies that took a long time to be profitable. IDK if Oracle ever was.

Cloud computing was still profitable the entire time. Amazon alone could cover all of GCP expenses.

IIRC Amazon chose to reinvest early revenue to grow AWS intentionally, and the revenue curve eventually evened out and obviously surpassed expenses. The problem with the AI buildout is that there's not a ton of evidence that these companies are approaching profitability, we can't even know because they're private.

Amazon's incubation of AWS was methodical and transparent. OpenAI is saying that they don't expect to be profitable until at least 2030, with over a trillion dollars in committed spend before that point. It's the largest "trust me bro" play in human history.

Apples to oranges

Hey now, some of them reach -50% profit margins!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com