121–130 of 144 posts
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There’s roughly 8b people in the world and somewhere between 2-3b have never used the internet. If OpenAI manages to capture the 6b internet users growing at 100% per year, they have 3 years of user growth left max. Then what?
They do what Facebook and Google did. Ads.
What happens if OpenAI collapses at this point? Is it just too big to fail given defense contracts and Microsoft? The Sora sunsetting marked a big shift towards enterprise focus and meeting Anthropic on the enterprise battlefield, but almost all engineers I work with or know are using Claude at this point exclusively. Anyone seeing differently?
The warning signs are already starting to show up though, projects are being stalled, not filled out, blaming it on delays from China etc, but the funding is still present, the construction keeps going on of the next building even as the last one sits vacant and offline. The sky high purchases of property from connected individuals by site developers continue, even as pushback mounts and many places are passing anti-datacenter ordinances.
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I think The Verge said it the best. Taking advantage of these tools to the maximum requires you to have "software brain" which the average person does not have. They struggle to set up a simple automation in their smart home platform of choice. There is little reason to believe they will take the leap to use such tools to simplify daily tasks because it requires people to think about which daily tasks can be simplifi…
The point of AI is that it's supposed to be intelligent. Why silo it in an app? Instead of telling it what to automate, shouldn't it sit at the OS level, watch everything you do, and figure out what to automate by itself?
Read that again and really ask yourself if you want a private company to have access to all that and the ability to do whatever it wants with your system at the OS level.
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"previous killer apps" - exactly. That's the point. Everyone is anchored in AI as being the next desktop app. It's not. We're only using 1% of what these models will ultimately do when they're running 24/7 as utilities serving new economic models. There just isn't enough compute right now to realize the larger monetization strategies.
On top of that, the APIs/Tools/Function Calls into the real world don't exist yet. But consumer products are going to start eventually exposing functionality to these LLMs. By that time, I wonder if we'll all have an edge-inference box sitting in every one of our houses that we buy from a consumer products company like Apple or from Amazon, or directly from OpenAI or Anthropic. These little brains will be the low lat…
That's my biggest concern with it, I don't see the business case closing anywhere, and without businesses that actually make money all the technology in the world doesn't actually do anything.
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I know that people keep saying "we're early on here", but I take it as a negative signal that people keep thinking we are in the early innings here. Compared to previous generations of technology change, a great deal of time has passed, it should be a bit disconcerting that no one seems to have found a way to make money out of this yet. Look at previous killer apps- they came out quickly and were raking in money very…
Comparing the IPO market today to the IPO market in the late 90s is not very instructive. You could have IPO'd a lemonade stand in 1998 and raised $10 million.
And that's the weird one, all of the other examples I provided were booking real profits by this point in their technology cycle.
It’s an absolutely hilarious/absurd valuation for a company that has absolutely no path to do anything other than lighting money on fire, forever. I’d call it nonsense, but Tesla’s valuation proves the market runs on shenanigans, at this point, so whatever. If people want to meme OpenAI into a trillion dollar market cap, I guess let them?
Ah yes, the weekly "ChatGPT is definitely going to fail, for real!" post, with absolutely no substance whatsoever. Still, they know it will definitely be on the front page, regardless. Make sure you subscribe to their pub!
Claude Code is extremely easy to set up and use. I suspect its saturation among software professionals is at the majority of the addressable market. What if there are no other killer apps for Enterprise? Only CC will produce the level of token churn that could drive huge profits for model providers. The Enterprise market is not as substantial as the rapid success of CC makes seem.
This is not an AI thing, this is a stocks thing, which Ive been complaining about incessantly.
If a given domain, like AI, has competition, that means you have to sell things at cost + margin, and rush ahead or be crushed by competitors. Will definitely make you good money, but wont make you a king.
This is not the kind of money people involved with these kinds of companies are looking for.
AI right now looks like a competiton, with many horses in the race, which are more or less building the same product.
It will hard to squeeze and enshittify this considering people can just jump to another vendor, thus if the current market structure were to prevail, investors would go.
Thus competition has to go.
Altman knows this, and tried to position OpenAI as the obvious winner in this competition, but I guess in the process he managed to alienate people, so now he's not doing so well.
But who knows what the future will bring?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know that people keep saying "we're early on here", but I take it as a negative signal that people keep thinking we are in the early innings here. Compared to previous generations of technology change, a great deal of time has passed, it should be a bit disconcerting that no one seems to have found a way to make money out of this yet. Look at previous killer apps- they came out quickly and were raking in money very…
"previous killer apps" - exactly. That's the point. Everyone is anchored in AI as being the next desktop app. It's not. We're only using 1% of what these models will ultimately do when they're running 24/7 as utilities serving new economic models. There just isn't enough compute right now to realize the larger monetization strategies.
How can this be relevant? Why isn't the compute we have available right now sufficient for turning a profit?
Is this another one of those "We lose money on each sale but make it up in volume" things?
I mean, if much much larger investments are needed before current LLM providers can turn a profit, that's not a good indicator that they have any sort of sustainable business, is it?