| ▲ | thor-rodrigues 3 hours ago |
| A lot of money moved through different hands, yet it doesn’t seems that nothing of value was created. I wonder how any of this makes sense. |
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| ▲ | scrollop 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Have you peeked at how the (very complicated) financial markets work? Lot's of people staring at computers moving money and ious around complicated networks within complicated rules making money making money making money. Really progressing humanity forward :/ |
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| ▲ | nater5000 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | >Really progressing humanity forward :/ You're using amazing technology funded through those financial processes to complain that those financial processes aren't progressing humanity forward lol. Modern AI is the perfect example of how financial systems are important for technological progression. Thinking complex financial systems aren't contributing to humanity's progress because you don't recognize how it is used to fundamentally support the work that progresses humanity is like thinking taxes are a scam because you don't recognize how much you actually benefit from taxes everyday. | |
| ▲ | Sharlin 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Replace the people with LLMs and we're well on our way to immanentizing the "Vile Offspring" of Stross's Accelerando. |
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| ▲ | schleck8 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This seems reductive. Character.ai has > 20 million monthly active users, and a lot of company valuation happens on the basis of user count (which is legitimate, that's not vaporware) |
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| ▲ | thor-rodrigues 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I have the impression that if MAU by itself was sufficient, the company wouldn’t have had to file for bankruptcy. Obviously the company failed to convert its MAU into paying users, despite the fact the token costs greatly declined over the last years. | | |
| ▲ | embedding-shape 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Why don't they just not count token costs at all (or any other cost-per-user) and only look at profits, like what Anthropic is doing to figure out if they're profitable? |
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| ▲ | PxldLtd 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I disagree that it's reductive. If each user costs more in API tokens then your company isn't valuable. That's what everyone's been screaming from the rooftops about there being a bubble. We certainly use tons of AI at the company I work for, if we were paying full API prices then I would bet we'd be barely using it. | | |
| ▲ | phillipcarter an hour ago | parent [-] | | There's always enterprise wheeling and dealing to keep something discounted, but enterprises are absolutely paying API prices for tokens. For AI coding a least, the issue is more about attributing tokens to a real backlog (no leeching tokens for side projects) and keeping things from running away, both of which all the major AI coding platforms offer solutions for. |
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| ▲ | skeeter2020 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | webvan and pets.com have entered the chat. | |
| ▲ | irl_zebra 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | As we saw after the hero Zelenskyy took down Yandex data centers, user count seems to be vaporware in many cases. | | |
| ▲ | gaiagraphia an hour ago | parent [-] | | I'm seeing this repeated a lot, but I'm rarely seeing the evidence to back it up. Presumably you're not speaking about Yandex's search engine crawlers here, right? In an internet full of metrics and graphs, it's odd that nobody's bringing anything to the table and is just repeating the meme. A bit bottish in itself, tbh. If it turned out "usercount was vapourware" due to 3 Russian data centres getting btfo, I think there'd have been a global financial crisis underway as we speak. |
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| ▲ | cicko an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | A drug dealer at the corner also has lots of active monthly users. |
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| ▲ | post-it 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It seems like a lot of people enjoyed using the product. Isn't that value? |
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| ▲ | jansport123 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| the rich in society (corps, individuals) are so absurdly rich that they can keep throwing money till something sticks with almost 0 risk. If you believe AI is something civilizationally transformational which it is resonable to believe, then why not throw some money at it. |
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| ▲ | Ekaros 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| But lot of numbers went up. And that mean lot of other numbers went up. Which means "wealth" for many went up. And they got bonuses paid. |
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| ▲ | roncesvalles 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| A valuable company wasn't created in the end, but all kinds of value spewed out of this endeavor. The co-founders almost certainly walked away filthy rich. A few hundred people got 6-figure paychecks. A few early investors probably made a profit selling to greater fools. It is rumored that their last round valued them at $6B. |
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| ▲ | skeeter2020 an hour ago | parent [-] | | accrete means grow or make larger/greater; this is the opposite were a bunch of value moved around, some was lost (from an efficiency / opportunity cost perspective) and a bunch was concentrated into the hands of a few. That's not value growth. | | |
| ▲ | roncesvalles 22 minutes ago | parent [-] | | True, I meant to say value was ejected from this i.e. there were some peripheral winners. I had a totally wrong definition in my mind of the word "accrete" (I was linking it to accretion discs around black holes). |
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| ▲ | SpicyLemonZest 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The US just has a lot of venture capital money running around. It's common for biotech companies to raise about as much as Character.ai (although typically at lower valuations) and then never end up launching a successful product. From a societal perspective, it's valuable to be able to search the space of long shots; from a funder's perspective, the rewards of a good investment are high enough to pay for a lot of bad ones. |
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| ▲ | turing_complete 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| welcome to the world of VC startups |
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| ▲ | PxldLtd 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Get with the program, numbers go up = ai valuable. Don't look any closer, details are the AI's problem now. |
