if you’re mad at this, don’t look at how much xai is worth.
ai is basically just a pump and dump for rich people before the bubble bursts
Finance bros who run wall street are all idiots, so they designed a system where no matter how stupid they are, they’re always right. If you get a bunch of finance bros in a room and give a really good sales pitch, your valuation can triple despite nothing real actually happening.
In the case of AI, even the foremost experts are uncertain about how useful AI is. Qualified people disagree and no AI based tool has really proved itself to be robust, but it is amazing at fooling people who are either dumb or willfully ignorant, so it’s like crack cocaine to anyone who works on Wall Street.
There are multiple multiple useful implementations. They might not be ethical and cost people jobs but there are loads of smaller projects in use. We use it to analyse pictures of completed work to ensure it is to standard, has been working great and passed all audits.
Totally normal. Just keep throwing stupid amounts of money at it so it can find a way to undercut some existing business structure by operating at a loss until that business is dead and then enshittify. Profit! /s
It shouldn’t be, but it is. 20 years ago, in the far-off year of 2005, a lot of tech companies more or less followed the same path, where it took decades for them to actually be profitable, if they were at all.
YouTube ran at a deficit for something close to 15 years. AI companies are likely following this trend, and running mostly on investment money, rather than being self-sufficient.
I don’t know about now, but Amazon ran a deficit for pretty much its entire existence. Amazon is a bit different though since it was part of an R&D strategy and they could’ve stepped off the gas at almost any point and been profitable.
That’s a long established myth. Amazon started out in 94, and became profitable in like 10 years. Most of their hardcore R&D is self-financed cause they generate just that much free cash.
Right. They spend their free cash (and sometimes more) on R&D and infrastructure, which by definition means they’re unprofitable. Profit is what’s left after expenses, so if you have nothing left, you’re unprofitable.
Tech companies were in that boat in the late 90s as well.
The dot com bust deflated it somewhat, but somehow the industry got right back to it within a couple of years.
Capitalism doesn’t sell performance. It sell ‘potential’ and ‘perceived gains’.
I sell my dates on my potential wealth and potential penis size. People need to get on the capitalism grindset.
And women sell dates on their potential to do that thing that was discussed but then try to backtrack by pretending they thought it was a joke and didn’t even bring a banana.
It’s what we in the biz would refer to as a “grower”, which is in contrast to a “shower”.
If you’re gonna sell dates you better be a grower! Dates don’t just grow themselves!
“I have a great venture Idea for you Susan. What if, and hear me out, what if my penis was at least average size! I already have an investor lined up in the bedroom, you’d be crazy to pass on this opportunity”
That’s how every single company targeting consumer market in the web started. No profit for many years. Majority because of scale of the market. Facebook started making profit after 2012 so for 8 years they were burning money figuring out where to sell their soul to. Now the scale and risk for OpenAI is way bigger, because they have not sold their users fully or we don’t know if they sold it and for exchange for what. It would be funny if they at some point alter their privacy policy and turn out to sell people’s chats to advertising agencies. They might also go bankrupt or turned out to be a scam that hires thousands of people to answer questions.
I should fucking hope OpenAI isn’t profitable.
People always act like “how can company A be a thing when it isn’t profitable”. It isn’t about if company A is profitable. It’s about whether CEO A is making money. As long as that can happen and, you know, others at the top, company A is right on track.
Gotta keep in mind, profit can always be distorted based on how much employees are getting paid.
Someone is making money. In fact, a lot of people are.
The history of the Internet and computers in general is full of investors willing to take seemingly insane chances on overvalued speculative ventures.
Private equity is so pumped full of cash that they basically have nothing better to do with it.
No.
Aka why not to have headlines in the form of a question.
AKA Betteridge’s law of headlines.
That’s because it’s just gambling.
With extra steps.
As a major investor into Open AI future, I’d gladly exchange all my non-existing stakes for a blowjob by fugly Sam Altman. It wouldn’t turn into any profits, but for some time, he’d have something in his mouth that isn’t a lie or a sketchy promo. I believe, some on Open AI board would even pay me to keep him silent.
absolutely should. america lives in an idiocracy. a trump meme coin could be valued at 100trillion $ and thats fine. if you want feudalism with extra steps, this is exactly that. go buy some golden sneakers and maybe they’ll be worth a million some time or not.
So now we are actually to the point where we can ask if a corporation or more widely anything at all has any value if it makes no profit.
There are people in the world who by luck of birth or circumstance have amassed obscene wealth and they after the fact are trying to convince everyone that profit is the only thing of value. These are the real public enemies.
Altman has since said the company is losing money on its $200-per-month Pro subscriptions, which offer limitless access to its most recent model, OpenAI o1, and to its video generator, Sora AI. “People use it much more than we expected,” he wrote in a post on X.
It’s ridiculous. More people use the product, so they’re losing money? What. That’s the complete opposite of what a business is.
Not to mention the environmental damage they’ve been doing for close to no positive results.
It’s not more people using the product, it’s the limited population who are paying $200/month use it way more than they thought they would. So the costs per person paying that are going way over $200/month. Basically, they made the mistake of setting a fuck off price that was too low and a bunch of people did the math and took them up on the offer.
If the product costs that much to run, and most users aren’t abusing their access, it’s possible the product isn’t profitable at any price that enough users are willing to pay.
This is dumb. Moore’s law may be mostly dead, but chips are still progressing at an absurd pace. In 6 years you’ll be able to run the o1 model on a raspberry Pi with no internet access.
Nvidias latest gen looks to be 30% faster after 2 years of development with about the same power usage increase. So no reduction in Joules per GOP, just a speed increase.
In 6 years they might go 2x the speed of today but need double the watts (to deliver the same energy in half the time).
Maybe, but i never mentioned years into the future. Of course technology will improve. The hardware will get better and more effcient, and the algorithms and techniques will improve.
But as it stands now, i still think what i said is true. We obviously don’t have exact numbers, so i can only speculate.
Having lots of memory is a big part of inference, so I was going to reply to you that prices of memory stopped going down at a similar historical rate, but i found this, which is interesting
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage?time=2020..latest
The cost when down by about 0.1x from 2000 to 2010. 2010-2020 it was only about 0.23x. 2020-2023 shows roughly another halving of the price, which is still a pretty good rate.
The available memory is still only one part. The speed of the memory and the compute connected to it also plays a big part in how these current systems work.
There’s absolutely no doubt that lower-end models are going to keep improving and that inference will keep getting cheaper. It won’t be on a Raspberry but my money’s with you. In 6 years you’ll be able to buy some cheap-ish specialized hardware to run open models on and they’re gonna be at least as capable as today’s frontier models while burning a fraction of the energy.
In fact i wouldn’t be surprised if frontier models were somehow overtaken by vastly cheaper models in the long run. The whole “trillion parameter count” paradigm feels very hacky and ripe for radical simplification. And wouldn’t it be hilarious ? All those suckers spending billions building a moat only to see it swept under their feet.
lmaoooo
Because the people that innovate do not care for business and are not good at it, but everything in this world we created has to be sold so there is always this initial mismatch before the business graduate vultures, who innovate nothing descend on it, beg control and then go way too far in the opposite direction. At that late point the only innovation will be a slightly more rounded set of icons on the website.
I almost shat myself in half when I saw how much water is needed for cooling for every prompt
needed? no, water cooling was a choice
Used was probably a better term there.
Why is the water consumed? Can it not be cooled and recirculated?
Easier to dump the hot water and get new cold water.
This is the post-scarcity shift. This is how it happens.
We need to take, by force, those who have too much and give it to those who have too little.
They will be kicking and screaming. That means we’re doing something right, because they are not our allies.
A company can have value without making profit. It can own assets. It has value in its staff.
Now should it have a valuation like OpenAI? Fuck no!
