Ask HN: Has anybody made money off of AI in prod?

#1

Post by fracternal » Tue, Jun 11, 2024, 9:23 AM UTC

So much hype around the ai space and it feels like every new startup on the planet has AI in it one way or another. Are we kidding ourselves that this can actually go into prod and make companies profit positive vs the old way of doing things or do you think this is an actual inevitable reality?

Has any company even made any money here? Hallucinations are still super high. I’ve seen a few examples where the model is deterministic and trained heavily on certain prompts but it starts to get into the gray area of just being rules based. What do you think?

Re: Ask HN: Has anybody made money off of AI in prod?

#2

Post by xenospn » Tue, Jun 11, 2024, 9:34 AM UTC

NVIDIA. Picks and shovels.

Re: Ask HN: Has anybody made money off of AI in prod?

#3

Post by fracternal » Tue, Jun 11, 2024, 9:40 AM UTC

xenospn wrote: post #2

NVIDIA. Picks and shovels.

Yeah they have rocked it here but I meant companies using software, APIs and models etc and not the hardware (gpu) side of the equation

Re: Ask HN: Has anybody made money off of AI in prod?

#4

Post by tlb » Tue, Jun 11, 2024, 10:04 AM UTC

Regular reminder that profit is a trailing indicator of success. If something is growing fast and bringing in revenue, you should be spending money to grow it as fast as possible. So profit *should* be negative while it's growing. When the growth phase is nearly complete (because you've saturated the market) you can stop spending on growth and bank most of the revenue as profit.

OpenAI will have $2B revenue this year [0]. Presumably the plan is to double that a few more times over a few years, after which they'll have a big profitable business.

[0] https://www.ft.com/content/81ac0e78-5b9b-43c2-b135-d11c47480...

Re: Ask HN: Has anybody made money off of AI in prod?

#5

Post by petercooper » Tue, Jun 11, 2024, 11:07 AM UTC

I use AI pretty heavily but as a tool to help me scale up my usual work and cover more ground than I otherwise could (so very much "human in the loop"). So AI makes me and many other people money, but not through the direct provision of AI services to the public (though even there, it's all over the place - Bloomberg has AI news analysis and stuff in their terminal now, for example).

Re: Ask HN: Has anybody made money off of AI in prod?

#6

Post by al2o3cr » Tue, Jun 11, 2024, 1:18 PM UTC

tlb wrote: post #4

Regular reminder that profit is a trailing indicator of success. If something is growing fast and bringing in revenue, you should be spending money to grow it as fast as possible. So profit *should* be negative while it's growing. When the growth phase is nearly complete (because you've saturated the market) you can stop spending on growth and bank most of the revenue as profit. OpenAI will have $2B revenue this year…

If you've got $4B to set on fire, you can have $2B of "revenue" selling dollar bills for 50 cents. That doesn't mean that throwing another $20B on the fire is going to suddenly turn profitable.

The better question is: did the people that paid OpenAI $2B get value from that expense?