Fuckin LLM bubble needs to burst already. I want some crazy compute cards to play with.
Not even OpenAI's $200/mo ChatGPT Pro plan can turn a profit
Submitted 4 months ago by cm0002@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/06/altman_gpt_profits/
Comments
whodatdair@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 months ago
db2@lemmy.world 4 months ago
That’s because the whole thing is stupid. Is made by stupids, marketed to stupids, paid by stupids, and for the most part used by stupids. Because they’re stupid.
There’s a pattern in there if you look closely.
sepi@piefed.social 4 months ago
I feel like you're putting it down, but for the life of me, I am not picking it up. Can you please try explaining again, but slower? Use simple words. Like I'm stupid or something.
CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I think he’s trying to say it’s marketing’s fault.
Pilferjinx@lemmy.world 4 months ago
There is value in current ai but everyone who’s in charge thinks it’s economic value.
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
If AI cost peanuts to run, this would be a very reasonable point. But it doesn’t. It’s staggeringly expensive to operate something like ChatGPT.
So any use of genAI has to consider the question “Do the benefits provided actually justify the cost?”
Obviously, in a capitalist society this turns into “How can we monetize this?”, but even in a fully socialist society it would still be necessary to ask if this technology is actually providing sufficient societal benefit to actually justify the material resource cost of running it.
babybus@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Or you’re stupid because you can’t use LLMs effectively, don’t understand their value, and now you’re angry because of that.
ChowJeeBai@lemmy.world 4 months ago
The amount of money stupid gives to stupid, though. Makes my stomach churn. So much for so little.
ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
I think this is just OpenAI marketing.
“Insane thing: We are currently losing money on OpenAI Pro subscriptions!” he wrote in a post.
The problem? Well according to @Sama, “people use it much more than we expected.”
Oh no, ChatGPT is too useful to customers! Altman isn’t going to be telling any real problems that OpenAI has to the whole world over Twitter.
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
You’re right, that’s definitely what Sam is trying to do here. Unfortunately for him, he’s still an idiot, and he’s inadvertently telling on himself here by openly confirming what’s been well understood for a while; ChatGPT simply is not profitable to run because the models are so stupidly inefficient. That’s a real problem, and one that they’ve shown no meaningful plan for solving.
Nomad@infosec.pub 4 months ago
Strange coincidence right as they want to convert to a for-profit company structure. “Bro we are not even making profits, nothing to see here bro”
Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 4 months ago
What is the use case for a $200 a month AI subscription? It’s a lot of money to spend on a novelty, clearly people are finding it useful.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Lazy idiots
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
Bruh. Meanwhile I’m still with my free and libre Mistral-7B I refined using my own WhatsApp messages and I almost never use it…
fluxion@lemmy.world 4 months ago
You don’t use it because the AI already took over your life and murdered your biological counterpart
hark@lemmy.world 4 months ago
With OpenAI being at the center of the AI hype, I would’ve thought they’d be raking in the dough instead of losing $5 billion. So it’s really just Nvidia making money on this bullshit, huh? It’ll hurt when the hype dies down and Nvidia drops from the second top spot on the S&P 500. We’re all going to feel that one.
dustyData@lemmy.world 4 months ago
You know, to make money in a gold rush, don’t dig, sell shovels.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
And Nvidia has really fancy shovels.
brie@programming.dev 4 months ago
What is AI gold then?
Deceptichum@quokk.au 4 months ago
Eh all these companies operate as loss leaders until they capitalise the market.
So yeah some small loses here and there to make back far more in the future.
hark@lemmy.world 4 months ago
The assumption is that they’ll develop some kind of moat, but there are plenty of other AI models on offer or in development. It would also be useless capturing a market when the companies that would be their customers realize they’re not making money on the AI themselves.
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Which is fine in theory, but “expected” based on what?
They haven’t demonstrated any ability to meaningfully improve their models (“meaningfully” meaning "sufficient to actually address the very serious concerns about their practical usability), they haven’t shown any ability to meaningfully capture enterprise sales for their API, and their conversion rate on free users to paid users is abysmal. Their only stated plan to increase revenues is doubling their prices, which given their already terrible user retention doesn’t actually seem like a reliable way to bring revenue up. Jacking up prices only works when your users find you indespensible, and everything OpenAI offers can be found elsewhere for less.
Windex007@lemmy.world 4 months ago
You have to get people hooked on your product, though.
If they and every other AI company just evaporated no one would really be bothered.
You can’t capitalize a market that doesn’t really exist.