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Is AI Profitable Yet?

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Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?

#211

Post by Retric »

fsckboy wrote: post #203
Retric wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> one virtual mega company Free market efficiency is inherently tied to having multiple companies. Treating the entire economy as a single company gives nonsensical results because it fundamentally differs from what actually occurs. You might as well compare the economy to a game of tick tack toe, inherent complexity isn’t something you can simplify it has meaningful consequences. Your ideas like many other ideas are…

> Treating the entire economy as a single company gives nonsensical results trust me bub, I've studied much more econ than you. If a competitive market sets the prices (check, that's what is happening), and you want to analyze statistics of a sector (check, that's what we are doing), you can take those competitive prices as "given" and hold them constant, and consolidate the assets of in industry into one virtual ent…

> I've studied much more econ than you.

Then try and justify why you say shit this clueless:

> how much will it make next year?" is not answered by running a simulation of competitive marketplace with production functions.

Profits next year very much depend on the number of companies involved 1 vs 100 is not going to give the same results. Like I hope you realize how false what you just said was. Because if you actually believe this there’s literally no point in talking with you.

Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?

#212

Post by y1n0 »

timonoko wrote: post #62

Gemini now remembers you wholesale and makes good analogies and shortcuts knowing youres personal capabilities. You are already hooked and paying starts any day now. Or maybe it starts recommending some marvellous products somewhat related to your query.

nice pkd reference

Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?

#213

Post by pjjpo »

7thpower wrote: post #146
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #37

AMD, 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…

With this line of thinking, nobody would have ever built refineries, or fabs, or clouds. The frontier labs have fantastic margin on inference. You do not understand how fantastic. And they have license to change inputs at will based on profitability. They are not only innovating on models and tooling, they are innovating on cogs (I wrote this btw, and I’m not going to stop writing this way because Claude discovered i…

This doesn't sound like Claude at all to me. Which is a good thing but wonder where that came from.

Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?

#214

Post by dwb »

fsckboy wrote: post #209
dwb wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that you’re right because you’re rich? The equity of the economy is not very similar at all to a game.

I know what i'm talking about, and you don't. That does not come from me being rich, it comes from me being raised as a far left-socialist, and being on the spectrum, and then studying economics and finance in graduate school and realizing what was true and what was wishing. Capitalism and free competitive markets solve exactly the problem that centrally planned economies are explicitly trying to solve but always fai…

Hilarious; such ugly arrogance. Of course it “works” to the extent that you describe, otherwise we wouldn’t be in exactly the situation that I’m against. Where you came from doesn’t matter at all. The system is working for you so you are for it.

You assume too much, that I am going to argue for centrally planned economies or something. I never claimed or implied I was an expert, or to what degree I’m “winning the race” (what a horrible way to think about human society!). I think it’s either an absurd failure of imagination or simple invested ideology, that we have to have either hardcore “free” markets (free for who?) or strict Soviet-style planning (typically with the assumption that we have only the knowledge and technology from that period too, for some reason). I think we can do a lot better than both.

Your impressive-sounding words about efficiency quickly fall apart for anyone who has actually looked at the dirty end of capitalist processes. Inefficiencies abound; the market optimises for only money which a lot of the time is a stupidly poor abstraction of the stuff of life that actually matters. And that abstraction enables and justifies untold cruelty and exploitation.

If you were a sort of capitalist-pessimist, saying that you didn’t like it but this seemed to be the least-worst option, I’d think you were woefully unambitious, but at least some way understandable. But you arrogantly defend this system, and brag about how your massive brain managed to exploit it. Welcome to HN, I guess.

Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?

#215

Post by YetAnotherNick »

dhosek wrote: post #205
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because in 2008 ordinary everyday people invested in overvalued things like house.

It went beyond that. I didn’t own a house, but my employer, facing an economic downturn, laid off about half its employees.

Because house is part of economy. Crypto went from $4T market cap to $2T and no wide impact was observed. Same will be true for $4T AI market cap.

Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?

#216

Post by fsckboy »

Retric wrote: post #211
fsckboy wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Treating the entire economy as a single company gives nonsensical results trust me bub, I've studied much more econ than you. If a competitive market sets the prices (check, that's what is happening), and you want to analyze statistics of a sector (check, that's what we are doing), you can take those competitive prices as "given" and hold them constant, and consolidate the assets of in industry into one virtual ent…

> I've studied much more econ than you. Then try and justify why you say shit this clueless: > how much will it make next year?" is not answered by running a simulation of competitive marketplace with production functions. Profits next year very much depend on the number of companies involved 1 vs 100 is not going to give the same results. Like I hope you realize how false what you just said was. Because if you actua…

>That’s an overly simplified model. AI companies spending results in infrastructure beyond the company such as manufacturing capacity, power lines, software systems, and even individual expertise.

in a competitive marketplace, economic profit will go to zero. so whether an AI company buy or rents outside infrastructure, or builds it itself doesn't matter, it makes no difference. Therefore, if your argument is "outside infrastructure X", you can see the meaning of that by looking at "assume the company bought up the whole industry including outside infrastructure, then go back and look what I said and it still applies" A company monopolizing outside infrastructure for its own use would not abuse its monopoly against itself, but even if it did, makes no difference the extra profit and extra loss would balance out. Would it abuse its monopoly against downstream customers? if we use the existing market prices unchanged in our example, that is analyzing the case where it does not, which is the case that is comparable to the current situation.

or to put it another way, let's say these are all publicly traded companies competing. What if I told you "hey, i've investigated the ownership of all these public shares, guess what, Elon Musk owns them all, he owns every share of every company in AI, and all the infrastructure suppliers. Does that change the analysis from what we see in the marketplace? no, it doesn't. You want to draw a bigger circle around more affected parties, the suppliers to the infrastructure suppliers: OK, Elon owns those too it turns out.

nobody is analyzing the future here, we're talking about the case of AI going bust, not trying to predict AI going bust.

if were were going to project the future, we still would not do it with a simulation using functions to model companies to try to come up with meaningful profit numbers, we would project profits (and costs and revenues) based on margins of similar industries

Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?

#217

Post by Retric »

fsckboy wrote: post #216
Retric wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've studied much more econ than you. Then try and justify why you say shit this clueless: > how much will it make next year?" is not answered by running a simulation of competitive marketplace with production functions. Profits next year very much depend on the number of companies involved 1 vs 100 is not going to give the same results. Like I hope you realize how false what you just said was. Because if you actua…

> That’s an overly simplified model. AI companies spending results in infrastructure beyond the company such as manufacturing capacity, power lines, software systems, and even individual expertise. in a competitive marketplace, economic profit will go to zero. so whether an AI company buy or rents outside infrastructure, or builds it itself doesn't matter, it makes no difference. Therefore, if your argument is "outsi…

> in a competitive marketplace … current situation.

Lots of words to say you don’t understand what you’re talking about.

At the most simple level monopolies extract profits through raising prices above that of a competitive market. This price increase reduces total sales even as it drives up profits.

As such the existence or non existence of a monopoly would change how much energy/etc AI was consuming among a host of other effects completely independent of how much utility it provided.

> nobody is analyzing the future here

That’s genuinely funny.

Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?

#218

Post by andirk »

DrewADesign wrote: post #104
nothercastle wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Being "a" player in a multi-billion $ industry is also pretty good. For example, Bing gets some small % of the search engine market, but that's still a ton of market and $. And Foursquare/Swarm is used by like 0.01% of the population, but they can still map the exact floor plan of Macy's and that Chipotle will lose 30% of their share value from people shiitting blood (both were extremely accurate).

And then Bing gets a pretty big upgrade: ChatGPT. And here we are.

Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?

#219

Post by DrewADesign »

andirk wrote: post #218
DrewADesign wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Being "a" player in a multi-billion $ industry is also pretty good. For example, Bing gets some small % of the search engine market, but that's still a ton of market and $. And Foursquare/Swarm is used by like 0.01% of the population, but they can still map the exact floor plan of Macy's and that Chipotle will lose 30% of their share value from people shiitting blood (both were extremely accurate). And then Bing gets…

Not for the amount of money they are spending to get there. Spending Money you’ll be paying back for decades to be a middling contender, without a significant moat, for something without any clearly-defined, real practical, sustainable business use cases is absolutely terrible.

Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?

#220

Post by DrewADesign »

DrewADesign wrote: post #219
andirk wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being "a" player in a multi-billion $ industry is also pretty good. For example, Bing gets some small % of the search engine market, but that's still a ton of market and $. And Foursquare/Swarm is used by like 0.01% of the population, but they can still map the exact floor plan of Macy's and that Chipotle will lose 30% of their share value from people shiitting blood (both were extremely accurate). And then Bing gets…

Not for the amount of money they are spending to get there. Spending Money you’ll be paying back for decades to be a middling contender, without a significant moat, for something without any clearly-defined, real practical, sustainable business use cases is absolutely terrible .

s/any/many
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