In fairness, whilst Google did reach profitability early (given the VCs had got their fingers burned on internet companies in 1999, they didn't have much choice) its revenues were lower than OpenAIs at IPO stage. The IPO was both well below Google's original hopes and considered frothy by others in the Valley because at the time the impressive and widely-used tech, limited as a business argument seemed to totally apply to the company that did search really well and had just settled the litigation for cloning Yahoo's Overture advertising idea. And their moat didn't look any better than OpenAIs

And much as AI hype irritates me, the idea that the most popular LLM platform becomes a ubiquitous consumer technology heavily monetised by context-sensitive ads or a B2B service integrated into everything doesn't seem nearly as fanciful as some of the other "next Googles". At the very least they seem to have enough demand for their API and SaaS services to be able stop losing money as soon as VCs stop queuing up to give them more.

Facebook got all the way to an IPO with business fundamentals so bad that after the IPO, Paul Graham wrote a letter to all the then-current YC companies warning them that the Facebook stink was going to foul the whole VC market in the following years. Meta is now worth something like 1.4T.

Google has also magnificently shit the bed with Gemini; their ads business is getting raked over the coals in court; they are a twice convicted monopolist; and are driving away top talent in droves.

It reminds me of the old joke:

Heard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper? On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself: So far so good... so far so good... so far so good.

Uber has not had a profitable year from their core business during its life time.