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Is AI Profitable Yet?

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Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?

#101

Post by DrewADesign »

fooker wrote: post #81
droidjj wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what people said about the banks in 2007. Just because the big players’ balance sheets can take the hit doesn’t mean the wider economy is insulated.

And all these banks were bailed out by big brother. So the people were right.

A) they still screwed the economy and everyone in it except themselves. B) Nobody gives a shit about the banks as businesses. They got bailed out because they physically made much of the world’s economy function, like plumbing. That’s not going to happen here.

Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?

#102

Post by conradkay »

fsckboy wrote: post #79
xbmcuser wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

if these companies go bankrupt, they will have spent (not lost) all their money, the large amounts of money that they got from investors. That money generated profits for other companies they bought stuff from, and income for their employees, and capital gains for other people if AIco acquired other companies. the market cap of a company is computed by the current price of a company's shares, the last price paid; not…

That's one way to look at it, though it feels like you could say the same about the dot-com crash or 2008 which isn't too helpful. At the very least (extremely high-paying) jobs can be actually lost

Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?

#103

Post by altcognito »

mgh2 wrote: post #60
crystal_revenge wrote: post #29

It’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.

The strategy of "scale for long term market dominance" or the idea of "build it and they will come" [1] were premised on the notion that adoption will be organic. AI usage seems to have plateaued overall [2], except for niche use cases like coding, that is why companies are forcing it on their employees to justify ROI [3] or creating "products" w/ AI features [4] or embedded addiction. [1] https://news.ycombinator.co…

> AI usage seems to have plateaued overall, except for niche use cases like coding,

I sure hope more people think like this, because it's going to leave a lot of money on the table (for me)

Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?

#104

Post by DrewADesign »

nothercastle wrote: post #75
SXX wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bitcoin is here to stay so is crypto but the impact was much more limited then initially predicted

And the money these companies are blowing on all of this shit is banking on them being ‘the’ dominant player in a completely world-changing commodity industry.

Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?

#106

Post by wmedrano »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #29

It’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.

We're talking about ~1 trillion $$$ valuations here tho

Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?

#107

Post by loeg »

wmf wrote: post #59
SXX wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Difference is that Amazon, Microsoft, Google or Oracle are not going out of business if it all collapses. Neither chip or hardware manufacturers will be harmed.

Oracle is on the edge; if they can't put their capex in SPVs they would get taken out by a crash.

Oracle is a tiny fraction of the stock market.

Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?

#108

Post by vips7L »

Aurornis wrote: post #84
crystal_revenge wrote: post #29

It’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.

We go through this with every startup cycle. Startups are not expected to be profitable because they’re spending so much money on growth and R&D. The concept of running a business in an intentionally unprofitable state is confusing to those who don’t understand startup funding. The weird thing is that so many people believe that inference is unprofitable. There are large open weights models that companies run at a pr…

You have to be naive to believe that any pricing is permanent.

Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?

#109

Post by OsrsNeedsf2P »

throwaway85825 wrote: post #90
conradkay wrote: post #85

The numbers for Meta are pretty misleading, I assume the $3 billion is something like direct generative AI revenue? Sure they're torching money on building consumer LLMs, but they seem to be doing very well optimizing things like ad ranking https://engineering.fb.com/2025/11/10/ml-applications/metas-... https://engineering.fb.com/2026/03/31/ml-applications/meta-a...

Isn't ad ranking just SORT price;

Assuming you're not trolling, there's a few other things to consider -

1/ User targeting is complex - you can charge more for ads if the users you're showing the ads to click

2/ Ads impact user retention - you need to balance making money and keeping users around

3/ AI generated ads - this is a pretty big thing now, where instead of bringing your own media, you just describe your target audience and the AI will A/B test media + CTAs for you

4/ Integrity - you want to vet the ads against laws/site policies

Probably forgetting a few, but there's a reason the ad industry employs so many

Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?

#110

Post by Mistletoe »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #70
xbmcuser wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Loss to who? Now all of a sudden, we are caring about investors and sovereign funds? And I think we passed the threshold for crash down for AI, even if AI companies wont be that profitable. Nvidia/cloud providers will be profitable as long as there is demand for AI.

Almost every single person’s retirement has exposure to this unless they have some sort of Bitcoin/gold/small cap value type portfolio.
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