The ai companies haven’t even found a viable business model yet, are bleeding money while the user base is shrinking
underline960@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
13.5%, slipping to about 12%
I know that 1.5% could mean hundreds of businesses, but this still seems like such a nothing burger.
sexy_peach@feddit.org 1 day ago
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 16 hours ago
The AI data centers arnt cheap to cooldown, or power. plus the “customers” are mostly other csuites and ceos anyways.
shalafi@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The lack of business model is what’s freaking me out.
Around 2003 I was talking to a customer about Google going public and saying he should go all in.
“Meh, they’re a great search engine, but I can’t see how they’ll make any money.”
Still remember that conversation, standing in his attic, wiring his new satellite dish. Wonder if he remembers that conversation at well.
setsubyou@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
What gets me is that even the traditional business models for LLMs are not great. Like translation, grammar checking, etc. Those existed before the boom really started. DeepL has been around for almost a decade and their services are working reasonably well and they’re still not profitable.
underline960@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Isn’t that the case with a lot of modern tech?
I vaguely recall Spotify and Uber being criticized relying on the “get big first and figure out how to monetize later” model.
(Not defending them, just wondering what’s different about AI.)
khornechips@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Spotify is a music streaming service with subscription fees generating recurring revenue, it would be fine in a world without an investor class obsessed with infinite growth. Uber is to taxis what crypto is to banks, essentially exploiting a gap in regulations to undercut an existing market.
“AI” is a solution desperately looking for a problem to justify all the money and resources being wasted on it.
underline960@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
What are you talking about? ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc. all have “subscription fees generating recurring revenue” and are famously “exploiting a gap in regulations to undercut an existing market.”
Uber took 15 years to become profitable, and Spotify took 18.
Again, I’m not defending any of them (they all exploit the people who make their service work), but so far AI seems to be going down the same road.
Saleh@feddit.org 1 day ago
That is more than a 10% loss of that customer base in 2 month.
For any industry that is huge.
CommanderCloon@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
But they’re already not making money, losing customers during the supposed growth phase is absolutely devastating. It’s occuring all while AI is being subsidized by massive investments from the likes of microsoft and google, and many more namelesss VCs through OpenAI, anthropic etc.
Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
The issue isn’t the percentage, it’s that inverse of growth. Most investors desire growth to see returns on investment for their upfront capital. If growth isn’t occurring, that’s a good sign to read the room and pull your funding.
Similar issues occurred with streaming services. Netflix is still profitable, but because the userbase isn’t growing, investors and the financial world stopped seeing it as a valuable platform to invest in.