Only until the music stops. Racing to give away the most stuff for free can only last so long. Eventually you run out of other people’s money.

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patapong 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Uber managed to make it work for quite a while

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raddan 2 hours ago | parent [-]

They did, but Uber is no longer cheap [1]. Is the parent’s point that it can’t last forever? For Uber it lasted long enough to drive most of the competition away.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/25/second-st...

	▲	somewhereoutth 2 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Uber's genius was getting their workers (sorry, 'contractors') to carry the capital costs of providing the fleet of vehicles they use.
	▲	fwip an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Uber's in a business where you have some amount of network effect - you need both drivers available using your app, as well as customers hailing rides. Without a sufficient quantity of either, you can't really turn a profit. LLM providers don't, really. As far as I can tell, their moat is the ability to train a model, and possessing the hardware to run it. Also, open-weight models provide a floor for model training. I think their big bet is that gathering user-data from interactions with the LLM will be so valuable that it results in substantially-better models, but I'm not sure that's the case.