No economic incentives to seek profit?

Yeah there certainly aren’t when you can sucker everyone else into paying for your money losing company and cash out in the secondary market.

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zahllos a day ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah. No revenue. Nobody wants to hear about revenue! It's not about how much you make, it is about how much you're worth and who is worth the most? Companies that lose money.

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babelfish a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

800M WAU is a "losing company"?

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disgruntledphd2 a day ago | parent | next [-]

The W is important there. If the DAUs were good, they'd report those. I do generally find that LLMs are a weekly thing at best in a chat bot form (the agentic stuff I use more often).

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moralestapia a day ago | parent [-]

Weird thing to fixate about when the whole industry actually uses MAUs.

Even if all GPT users only logged in once a week (which I highly highly doubt), the question still stands.

800M WAU is a "losing company"?

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boothby a day ago | parent | next [-]

If I operated a vending machine that spat out a dollar every time somebody pressed a button, I'd have just as many weekly users as I put dollar bills into it. You wouldn't call that a winning business despite the exceptionally high rate of 5-star reviews.

	▲	keeda a day ago \| parent [-]
		The more appropriate analogy is: you have a vending machine that dispenses a paper slip with your fortune on it everytime somebody presses a button. However you can only get one fortune told per day, but you can pay to get more in bulk. Turns out people find these fortunes super useful, and many are actually paying real money to get more, and each vending machine is actually making money on this. But now the vending machine industry has also figured out that bigger, more powerful machines produce tell better fortunes which draws in even more people. So now the industry is investing heavily to build more, bigger vending machines. However, these machines need tons of expensive parts and power, and oh, we can't slow down because China, and so they are racing like crazy to build more. Unfortunately, there is effectively only one company making a key part, and there's not enough power for all the machines being built, and so very expensive new infrastructure has to be built to meet the forecasted demand for all the fortunes in the world. And this requires trillions in funding, which gets very expensive to borrow, and so the US government is being asked to provide loan guarantees, because who better would know what interest payments on trillions of debt look like?

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mgh95 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It is a losing company if they aren't making money.

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SAI_Peregrinus a day ago | parent [-]

It's a losing company if they aren't making money and have no feasible path to do so.

	▲	Yizahi a day ago \| parent [-]
		It's a losing company if they aren't making money and have no feasible path to do so, considering amount of outstanding debts they already have and future debt they are planning to take.

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disgruntledphd2 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> Weird thing to fixate about when the whole industry actually uses MAUs.

Are you kidding me? Like, both Google and Facebook tracked l7, l28 which is the number of days that a person/account logged in over the last 7 or 28 days. Fundamentally, that's the sign of a useful product, in that people keep coming back.

> 800M WAU is a "losing company"?

Not enough information to be sure. If their business model requires selling dollars for fifty cents, then maybe.

I don't doubt the utility of these products (sometimes), but I do doubt the business model behind OpenAI & Anthropic (the "pure" model providers).

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array_key_first 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It definitely can be. If you have 800M MAU and no ways to make money, then you're a charity.

I can get 1 billion MAU if I just give out money or something. That's not impressive. Like, at all.

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zamadatix a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maybe, maybe not. The stat alone doesn't really dictate the answer - it just gives hope they'll be able to turn a profit one day (hopefully soon) without losing their position vs doubt of the same.

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jrflowers a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

“Money losing company” as in the company loses money, not “losing company” like their softball team got eliminated from the tournament

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gipp a day ago | parent | prev [-]

"money-losing"

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HWR_14 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Almost every Silicon Valley startup goes through a period where they seek growth, not profit and spend their investors money to maintain it.

	▲	gipp a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes, at about 1% of this scale. OpenAI's obligations are not something they can just run to daddy VC to pay for; he can't afford it either
	▲	malfist a day ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Sure, most of then lose millions of dollars, but uh, not trillions
	▲	BolexNOLA a day ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		But what percentage of those startups are making such grand promises while taking in such unfathomable amounts of capital? The sheer scale of the investment per AI company, the massive tax incentives being given out by states and debt being taken on by energy companies promising massive increase in loads…I mean this is all without precedent. AI speculation is rapidly driving infrastructural changes at the state level across the country. We know they can’t all be winners. But the price and ripple per failure (at least it seems to me) will be staggering. Am I off base here?
	▲	a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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