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Comment by SlightlyLeftPad | Hacker News Reader

In its current state the economics of the company make little sense to me. The astronomical costs to execute a prompt versus the relatively tiny price tag to the customer smells like an Enron scandal to me except everyone knows it and we’ve accepted it. Wall street is less forgiving.

Isn’t one of the reasons to go public to raise capital? They seemed to be doing that just fine without the weight of the open market with extremely profitable companies like Nvidia funneling billions of dollars in.

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I have not gotten good numbers on the real inference costs, its kind of annoying. Most comparisons are with the API costs, where we have no idea how profitable it is.

> Wall street is less forgiving.

Have you heard of $TSLA before?

Tesla generally makes enough money to cover their costs though

> Wall street is less forgiving.

We've seen multiple times how "Wall street" is an exit for insiders, with retail investors left holding the bag.

I don't get it. Isn't every IPO a potential exit for investors?

It adds liquidity for sure, and the option to actually exit. But the implication in these posts is often to exit a bad investment on the back of an ignorant public, explicitly stated in this post.

The idea is that today's companies don't go up after the IPO; only investors benefit from it.

How much does it cost to execute a prompt in your estimation vs. the cost to the customer? Even being a DeepSeek provider is profitable so long as you have utilization and the AI provides mostly have high utilization.

I was just thinking of this today. AI is pretty much precisely a Theranos style grift, but unlike Theranos, who were shooting for something outright impossible, Dario and Sam may be running the biggest "fake it till you make it" success story of all time. Because like Professor Harold Hill they came through in the clutch at the last possible moment, and produced a band that could kinda play music, enough to win enough faith and goodwill to fund the next round. That kind of good fortune is going to be worth untold billions if not trillions, and it's gonna make a lot of programmers butthurt because their hopes of getting in on the ground floor and being a "founding engineer" in the next Silicon Valley unicorn are dashed forever, because the Valley doesn't need them anymore. Just a business bro and enough compute to generate the operations for the business.

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