With the heat turning up on AI companies to explain how they will land on a viable business model some of this is starting to look like WeWork’s “Community Adjusted EBITA” arguments of “hey if you ignore where we’re losing money, we’re not losing money!” that they made right before imploding.

I think most folks understand that pure inference in a vacuum is likely cash flow positive, but that’s not why folks are asking increasingly tough questions on the financial health of these enterprises.

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Aurornis 5 days ago | parent [-]

A fast growing venture backed startup doing frontier R&D should be losing money overall.

If they weren’t losing money, they wouldn’t be spending enough on R&D. This isn’t some gotcha. It’s what the investors want right now.

	▲	JCM9 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Don’t disagree it’s what investors want. Point is just that we’re approaching a point from an economics standpoint where the credibility of the “it’s ok because we’re investing in R&D” argument is rapidly wearing thin. WeWork’s investors didn’t want them to focus on business fundamentals either and kept pumping money elsewhere. That didn’t turn out so well.