Sell shovels.
Is AI Profitable Yet?
131–140 of 229 posts
Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
How? Like if AI usage skyrockets, I am sure the money on the table will be gobbled up by multi billion dollar companies before you, i would assume?
And if they are right then what? You won't get a lot of money?
Seems like a weird mix of inflated ego and lack of business understanding by you on this comment.
Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?
#133It’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…
I don’t think “Usage has plateaued except for coding” is compatible with lab ARR at $80B and still growing exponentially.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-openais-sh...
Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?
#134AMD, Alibaba should be on there too. AMD is making good money on AI, with R&D at less than half the AI revenue. Whereas Alibaba's weird financials show it's kinda-sorta-protifable? I just wanna know how the OpenAI/Anthropic shell game works long-term. So both companies made equity deals with infrastructure providers; OpenAI on Azure, Anthropic on AWS, GCloud, and Colossus. They get a loan of compute credits and then…
Household names like Uber, Amazon, Blue Bottle Coffee and Fedex used the same playbook of burning investors’ cash for years and look where they’re now.
Everyone’s long term plan is hoping that they build out and survive long enough that, in the end, the market accepts them.
Even your local still-unprofitable restaurant is burning their grandparents’ inheritance money hoping that it works out.
But on the other hand, that’s what Theranos, WeWork, and Pets.com tried too.
Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?
#135It’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.
SaaS or web in general was disrupting X making it eventually the leader with some moat. I am not so sure about AI. I feel like there is a rush to make a commodity that will be nebulous to extract value from. Except for TMSC and NVidia.
Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?
#136It’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…
Plateaued? Lol. Based on what? Pg 18 and 45 on that link are not showing a plateau.
Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?
#137This ignores how much the stock has grown due to AI. Also many of these companies like Amazon, Google, and Meta drive a lot of incremental value due to both AI powered content suggestion and AI powered ad suggestion. Personalized ads has driven a ton of revenue.
Good point. We mustn't forget the magical money box: that's where the real value is delivered!
Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?
#138I know not the point, but is "PNL" a term people use now vs P&L?
Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?
#139NVidia showing so much profit, even they have acceess to some models like QWEN for free.
Talking about Anthropic and OpenAI, they charge so much, I dont understand this graph.
Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?
#140The 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...
Yes whoever made this website apparently doesn't understand how LLMs are being used for massively profitable consumer products like Instagram.