It's the SV playbook: invent a field, make it indispensable, monopolise it and profit.

It still amazes me that Uber, a taxi company, is worth however many billions.

I guess for the bet to work out, it kinda needs to end in AGI for the costs to be worth it. LLMs are amazing but I'm not sure they justify the astronomical training capex, other than as a stepping stone.

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lotsofpulp 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Why would a global taxi/delivery broker not be worth billions? Their most recent 10-Q says they broker 36 million rides or deliveries per day. Even profiting $1 on each of those would result in a company worth billions.

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simianwords 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

SV playbook has been to make sustainable businesses. Uber makes profits, so do Google, Amazon and other big tech.

> LLMs are amazing but I'm not sure they justify the astronomical training capex, other than as a stepping stone.

They can just... stop training today and quickly recuperate the costs because inference is mostly profitable.

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rich_sasha 2 days ago | parent [-]

All these businesses looked incredibly unsustainable for a long time. Uber was a cash shredder. Amazon didn't turn a profit for years, IIRC. They became profitable essentially by becoming quasi-monopolies.

Indeed, LLM companies likely turn operating profits, but I'm not sure that alone justifies their valuations. It's one thing to make money, it's another to make a return for investors.

And sure, valuations are growing faster than you can blink. Time will show if this in turn is justifiable or a bubble.

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filoleg 2 days ago | parent [-]

Cannot speak for the rest, but the whole “Amazon didn’t turn a profit for years” (as an argument about their profitability now coming solely through quasi-monololy routes) is incredibly misleading and bordering on disingenuous.

Since before AWS was even a thing, Amazon was already turning up great revenue and could’ve easily just stopped expanding and investing into the company growth, and they would be profitable easily. Instead, Amazon decided to reinvest all their potential profits into growth/expansion (with the favorable tax treatment on top) at the expense of keeping the cash profits. At any given point, Amazon could’ve stopped reinvesting all potential profits into their growth, and they would be instantly profitable.

This is not the same as Uber, which ran their core service operations at a net loss (and was only cheap due to their investors eating the difference and hoping that Uber will eventually figure out how to not lose money on operating their core service).

	▲	rich_sasha 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Ok, we can debate on Uber, but your take on Amazon is very similar to today's LLM providers. They too are making good revenue on their product, but put so much cash into growth that they at least appear to be running at a loss.