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.
khornechips@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Spotify provides a real, tangible service. I pay for access to music I get access to music.
What service does an LLM actually provide? They can’t be relied on for accurate information, they can’t reason, the only thing they seem to be able to do is psychologically manipulate their users. That makes money now, but in six months? A year? We’re already seeing usage fall despite some of the wealthiest companies on the planet burning unfathomable amounts of money.
underline960@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
“I pay for access to music I get access to music.” And with ChatGPT, you pay for access to an LLM, and you get access to an LLM.
Just because you personally don’t value that as a service doesn’t inherently invalidate it as a business model, now or in the future.
Netflix lost subscribers in 2011 and 2022, that didn’t kill the company. Uber stock tumbled during the pandemic and again in 2022. In 2023, Wired was writing about how “despite its popularity…the company has long struggled to turn consistent profits.”
This is a whole wave of companies where the survivors seem financially stable now, but had a long history of being propped up by venture capital and having an unclear path to profitability.
The only thing you’ve successfully shown is different so far is that you don’t think it’s a real service.
I generally agree, but I still don’t see anything that differentiates its trajectory from the Spotifys, Ubers, and Netflixes of the world.