Comment on Perplexity AI is complaining their plagiarism bot machine cannot bypass Cloudflare's firewall
very_well_lost@lemmy.world 7 hours agoA few weeks ago cloudflare announced they were going to block AI crawling (good, in my opinion). However they also added a paid service that these AI crawlers can use, so it actually becomes a revenue source for them.
I think it’s also worth pointing out that all of the big AI companies are burning through cash at an absolutely astonishing rate, and none of them are anywhere close to being profitable. So pay-walling the data they use is probably gonna be painful for their already-tortured bottom line (good).
Dogiedog64@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
It’s more than simply astonishing, it’s mind-blowingly bonkers how much money they have to burn to see ANY amount of return. You think a normal company is bad, blowing a few thousand bucks on materials, equipment, and labor per day in order to make a few bucks revenue (not profit)? AI companies have to blow HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS on massive data center complexes in order to train their bots, and then the energy cost and water cost of running them adds a couple more million a day. ALL so they can make negative hundreds of dollars on every prompt you can dream of.
The ONLY reason AI firms are still a thing in the current tech tree is because Techbros everywhere have convinced the uberwealthy VC firms that AGI is RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER, and will save them SO much money on labor and efficiency that it’ll all be worth it in permanent, pure, infinite profit. If that sounds like too much of a pipe dream to be realistic, congratulations, you’re a sane and rational human being.
ubergeek@lemmy.today 4 hours ago
See, that’s the trick, and it’s used by LOADS of startups:
You don’t actually have to see a return… You just have to have a good story showing there MAY be a GIANT return. The founders collect enormous salaries (Funded by VC dollars, not their own), they burn through the money to create more illusion, then ask for more, then burn through that, foretelling of the coming days when the money is just coming!
Meanwhile, just before it’s “projected” to become insanely profitable, they sell out to someone, walk away with a giant check, and the product evaporates.