Live data from Hacker News

Is AI Profitable Yet?

isaiprofitable.com

91–100 of 229 posts

Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?

#91
post #59
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.

I'm in no way expert on corporate finance, but Oracle has always been known to be sleaziest of sleazy companies. And Larry Ellison is still 6th richest person in the world and is not known to throw money on crazy moonshots like Mark Zuckerberg.

Oracle likely structured everything the way that its gonna be everyone else problem before they go down. No?

Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?

#92
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Exactly. The below reply to you also says the banks were bailed out. "So people were right".

How so? Big corps got home safe. Not the people. People committed suicides and lost their livelyhoods.

Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?

#93
I am relatively pessimistic about the profitability of those panning for gold in the downstream AI market.

The core bottlenecks are power and computing capacity, and they actually trace back to the exact same issue. It all comes down to the physical energy it takes to flip or move a single bit inside the ram or disk storage. This concept is subject to fundamental physical barriers.

There are a few ways to tackle this, like improving power efficiency, reducing model size, or pushing hardware further. However, achieving orders-of-magnitude improvement in any of these areas will cost a massive amount of time and money. I wonder if governments, corporations, and investors have the patience to wait for these tech breakthroughs.

Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?

#94
post #81
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.

[dead]

Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?

#95
post #81
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.

You're still ignoring their mention of the wider economy. The banks were bailed out, but everyone downstream of them still felt the brunt of the impact, atop paying for that bailout with tax dollars.

Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?

#96
This 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.

Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?

#97
post #64
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s weird to me that profitability is so thoroughly dismissed by the software tech industry because of an assumption that the tech industry will always be “early stage” and “high growth.” We can look at a “success story” like Uber and it is still net negative over its entire existence. This is a business that’s in a literal monopoly/duopoly status in most markets it operates in with vastly reduced regulatory burden…

And also: AI is basically the only thing anyone is talking about. Yeah, Uber existed and it's known about and was advertised and such. It has not overwhelmed every topic ever like the current LLM mandate has been. People are getting sit down and told they MUST engage with this stuff. How has the sheer saturation of LLMs not resulted in profit? It has dominated the conversation, center stage, of every news outlet for…

Right! I think the only example that comes to mind for me as far as “bled money for years and eventually became a cash cow” is YouTube. Most other ventures that bled money that long ended up dying.

Maybe Reddit is an example? But my impression is that they ran a modest operation before going public.

ChatGPT is the 5th most visited website in the world. Gemini.Google.com is ranked above amazon.com. Where is the profit?

Re: Is AI Profitable Yet?

#100

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.

Uhh I think a lot of people and their families likely have investment exposure to nvidia/hyperscalers. if places like Amazon spent unrealistically on ai or their stock goes down massively that could mean major job losses too.

If AI companies aren't that profitable...then they're going to stop spending so much money on GPUs to train AI models. A gigantic amount of Nvidia's profits would go bust overnight.

Post reply on HN