Soundtrack: Mack Glocky - Chasing Cars Last week, I spent a great deal of time and words framing the generative AI industry as a cynical con where OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei have used a compliant media and braindead investors to frame unprofitable, unsustainable, environmentally-damaging and mediocre cloud
  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
    1·
    2 hours ago

    I think it’s fairly uncontroversial that these companies are not profitable. But look at how long it took other web platforms or services to become profitable. For example Youtube or Reddit. They all live on investor money, with the expectation that they will become profitable one day. And OpenAI is fairly young in comparison, so they’re still in that phase. Difference is the ludicrous amount of money they burn through and the extent of the hype.

    • atrielienz@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 hour ago

      The point was that their business model can’t sustain growth of the userbase which makes it not like any other platform. The flaw is in comparing LLM companies to other tech companies where the larger the userbase, the more profitable they become.

      • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
        1·
        56 minutes ago

        Fair. But the current business model isn’t becoming profitable by growing the userbase. It’s first giving out things for free to grow the userbase, and then becoming profitable by adding enshittification. So I’d argue this is just the more modern approach. But I get the point.