The Uber comparison makes no sense. This is the opposite situation. Uber lost money on rides, OpenAI is (possibly) making money on inference. Uber used an R+D moonshot to autonomous driving to justify capturing an established industry without reducing costs meaningfully. OpenAI has a core product that risks becoming a commodity with open source models only 6 months behind.

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eiiee 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Google - Uber contribution margin

Amazing how misinformed people write on topics with confidence. Just stop lmao

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simianwords 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Uber didn’t lose money on rides other than some edge cases. What’s your source for this claim?

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disgruntledphd2 5 hours ago | parent [-]

The vast, vast amounts of money they spent on driver incentives city by city would seem to support the OPs claim (source: I was familiar with their spend on ads in the US approximately 10 years ago).

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simianwords 4 hours ago | parent [-]

There is no evidence that Uber was systemically losing money per ride instead of at edge cases. Share your evidence please.

	▲	disgruntledphd2 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Share your evidence please. This is an impossible ask unless one works at Uber. I can tell you that i saw how much they were spending on ads back in 2016, and how long it continued and can assure you that they were 100% losing money back then. Like, even now their margin is around 10% (they made 5bn on 50bn of revenue). Other software companies make a much, much, much better margin because Uber is basically not a real software business, it's an app attached to a low-margin delivery business.