Comment on Welcome to Campus. Here’s Your ChatGPT.
taladar@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks agoProbably not going to go belly-up, in a while
Don’t be so sure about that, the numbers look incredibly bad for them in terms of money burned per actual revenue, never mind profit. They can’t even pay for the inference alone (never mind training, staff, rent,…) from the subscriptions.
chaosCruiser@futurology.today 2 weeks ago
As long as they can convince investors of potential future revenue, they will be just fine. In the growth stage, companies don’t have to be profitable because the investors will cover the expenses. Being profitable becomes a high priority only when you run out of series F money, and you the next investors can’t borrow another 700 million. It’s a combination of having low interest rates and convincing arguments.
taladar@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
The difference between AI companies and most other tech companies is that AI companies have significant expenses that scale with the number of customers.
chaosCruiser@futurology.today 2 weeks ago
That’s a very good point. Actually, video hosting services also suffer from a similar problem, and that’s one of the main reasons why it’s so hard to compete with YouTube. Since there are so many LLM services out there at the moment, it makes me think that there must be a completely ridiculous amount of investor money floating around there. Doesn’t sound like a sustainable situation to me.
Apparently, the companies are hoping that everyone gets so hooked on LLMs that they have no choice but to pay up when the inevitable tsunami of enshittification hits us.
taladar@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
There are some numbers in this blog post wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-the-… (and a couple of others on the same blog) and they really don’t look like OpenAI is going to last a couple of years until profitability.