How are the Google numbers calculated? I've seen their net income increasing a lot as they've rolled out Gemini. This suggests that Gemini tokens are actually profitable, or at least not extremely unprofitable. Yet this site suggests that tokens are very unprofitable
Is AI Profitable Yet?
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Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?
#72It’s weird to me that people here suddenly seem to care about profitability for relatively early stage companies just because they’re “AI”. I know a traditional SaaS company I worked for that IPO’d years ago and still has no signs that they can be profitable (and many others like it) and nobody seems particularly concerned.
Well seeing how they've all collectively spent over a trillion dollars and American citizens still don't have medicare for all, universal childcare, free school lunch, a publics job program, or universal education; it's quite easy to see why the American public has soundly rejected this technology where some are even trying to inflict violence to stop it.
Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?
#73How are the Google numbers calculated? I've seen their net income increasing a lot as they've rolled out Gemini. This suggests that Gemini tokens are actually profitable, or at least not extremely unprofitable. Yet this site suggests that tokens are very unprofitable
Building a datacenter that will produce hundreds of billions of dollars worth of tokens over a multi-decade life shouldn't surprise anyone that it's in the red in year 1 or 2. There's a lot of front loaded capex in this business. If someone built a tractor factory you wouldnt expect 1 year payback.
But the site sort of implies that these companies are selling tokens for less than it takes to inference them. As if this is some sort of COGS ledger. Especially by throwing Nvidia in there. Don't take it too seriously.
Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
These companies are blowing through an incomparable amount of resources. If their bravado is misplaced, the economic impacts will be far more significant.
How so? Most of these companies will take a hit but will be fine Alphabet, Amazon, Google, etc can write off their entire investments in AI and will be a-OK. The pure AI companies will obviously be dead.
Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Not listing other hardware companies is just dishinest. AI is not a crypto mining where resources are just burned. AI is exactly like crypto mining in that Nvidia is the one who profited from both
Crypto mining bubble was 99% of speculation plus scams and 1% of R&D for decentralized finance. No matter what happen with the AI bubble text, image and video and other generative neural networks are here to stay. Whatever you like it or not this tech already changed a lot of industries and there is no going back.
Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?
#76Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?
#77How are the Google numbers calculated? I've seen their net income increasing a lot as they've rolled out Gemini. This suggests that Gemini tokens are actually profitable, or at least not extremely unprofitable. Yet this site suggests that tokens are very unprofitable
They're soaking up the investor bonanza into AI - Gemini ain't making them money.
For context Cloud Compute made 20bn in Q1, Other services made 90bn.
Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?
#78It’s weird to me that people here suddenly seem to care about profitability for relatively early stage companies just because they’re “AI”. I know a traditional SaaS company I worked for that IPO’d years ago and still has no signs that they can be profitable (and many others like it) and nobody seems particularly concerned.
Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?
#79It’s weird to me that people here suddenly seem to care about profitability for relatively early stage companies just because they’re “AI”. I know a traditional SaaS company I worked for that IPO’d years ago and still has no signs that they can be profitable (and many others like it) and nobody seems particularly concerned.
These companies are spending more money than budgets of many countries enough to add 2+% to the US GDP so the amount of loss for if it comes all crashing down will be huge.
the market cap of a company is computed by the current price of a company's shares, the last price paid; not all the shares of the company were bought at that price, the ones who got shares cheaper are showing paper profits, unrealized. Those who have already cashed out have money in their bank accounts that was transferred from people who wanted to get in. If the company goes bankrupt, their shares will be worthless, but the money they paid for them still remains in the accounts of people who sold their shares: the money was not lost even if some people lost money.
I'm not going to keep going through it but the reason it works to value things the way we do is that the values are comparable and they frequently work out, so snapshots of the economy and the participants are comparable. But "losses" are not like taking gold and feeding it into some deep fold in the earth where it will disappear into the molten middle of earth.
Stock valuations are "expectations for the future". Those expectations weren't money, they were lottery tickes where the lottery consisted of human creativity and human effort. People buying and selling share are moving real money around to trade the expectations. The money didn't go anywhere, it's still there, it's just that expectations for the future have been reduced. It all boils down to humans trading some of their time and potential on a bet that things work out. Some people's effort gets more rewarded than others. Not every team wins the world cup, but people like to play and like to watch.
Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?
#80Remember the model: 1. Outspend and outlast your competition until you have market dominance. Win over and lock in your customers with sweetheart deals. 2. Enshittify and squeeze your customers to pay back your debt. If you're using AI, you're not paying the true cost right now because we're in phase 1. Be ready for phase 2.