| ▲ | shagie 7 days ago |
| I am reminded of the Uncomfortable Amazon Truths ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20980025 ) by Corey Quinn. While they're protected now, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20980557 quotes the one I recall... - Nobody has figured out how to make money from AI/ML other than by selling you a pile of compute and storage for your AI/ML misadventures.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1173367909369802752.html maintains the entire chain of tweets. |
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| ▲ | janalsncm 6 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| > Nobody has figured out how to make money from AI/ML This is clearly not true. Google Ads? Every recommender system? Waymo self-driving? Uber routing algorithms? If you swapped out ML for LLMs I would largely agree. |
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| ▲ | QuinnyPig 6 days ago | parent [-] | | I do want to point out that I wrote this in 2019. It was a vastly different landscape, and AWS did a terrible job of promoting the ML value proposition. | | |
| ▲ | shagie 6 days ago | parent [-] | | I would love to see a retrospective on the AWS uncomfortable truths as a blog post and how they've held out over the past couple years. 2019 was a different time - though I suspect that your statement about making money (as in profit) rather than just revenue (reselling compute for less than you bought it) would hold true for most companies. | | |
| ▲ | QuinnyPig 6 days ago | parent [-] | | That’s an awesome idea. Let me get after it. | | |
| ▲ | shagie 6 days ago | parent [-] | | One of the debates I have with devops types is if OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) is a worse name than ICP (IBM Cloud Private). And would this be admitting defeat to the powers of Terrible Orange Website to get you to write more? As a side, in 2019 about a week after your tweets I was at a training session for Rancher which worked a reference to one of them into a joke. | | |
| ▲ | QuinnyPig 5 days ago | parent [-] | | I’m always amazed by how far my humor seemed to spread in those days. |
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| ▲ | chillee 7 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Clearly not true anymore given OpenAI and Anthropic's revenue growth. |
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| ▲ | shagie 7 days ago | parent [-] | | Revenue... yes. Profit is still an open question. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/08/chatgpt-gpt-5-openai-altman-... > Last year, OpenAI expected about $5 billion in losses on $3.7 billion in revenue. OpenAI’s annual recurring revenue is now on track to pass $20 billion this year, but the company is still losing money. > “As long as we’re on this very distinct curve of the model getting better and better, I think the rational thing to do is to just be willing to run the loss for quite a while,” Altman told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in an interview Friday following the release of GPT-5. Selling compute for less than it cost you will have as much revenue as you want to pay for. | | |
| ▲ | soared 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Anthropic founder described it as: if each model were a company, they be hugely profitable. It looks bad since when the model you trained in 2024 is generating net positive revenue, you’re also training a more expensive model for 2025 that won’t generate revenue until then. So currently, they’re always burning more cash than they’re bringing in, under the expectation that every model will increase revenue even more. Who knows how long that lasts, but it’s working so far. Paraphrase is from the podcast he was in with the stripe founder, cheeky pints I think | | |
| ▲ | janalsncm 6 days ago | parent [-] | | Which is not a good comparison because the LLMs are products not companies. If they are companies, they are competing against each other for revenue. If I switch from Gemini Pro to Opus, that is good for Anthropic. If I switch from Opus 4 to 4.1, that’s not as good for Anthropic. Sad that these CEOs can get away with this level of sophistry. |
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| ▲ | jquery 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >Revenue... yes. Profit is still an open question. could have said the same thing about most FAANG companies at one point or another. | | |
| ▲ | janalsncm 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The problem for OpenAI and the difference with other FAANGs is that they don’t own the internet. Other companies are able to replicate their product, which prevents them from fully realizing profits. Google doesn’t have this problem. They only run Google ads in their search results. Same thing for Facebook. | |
| ▲ | jcranmer 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | If I have the numbers right, OpenAI will burn more money this year alone than all of those prior companies did in their entire profitless phase of existence. |
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| ▲ | chillee 7 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Their gross profits are very high even though they're not making operating profit. |
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