This lame HN trope of LLMs having no business model needs to die.
It’s losing more billions than what it’s generating. Revenue does not equate profit.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/27/openai-sees-5-billion-loss-t...
If started selling 5 dollar bills for 1 dollar, I could generate a lot of revenue with $150B. You wouldn't believe the demand we would see for $5 bills.
That is only true is your primary concern in life is personal wealth and you’re burning other people’s money.
Remember when everyone on HN was sure Uber would never be profitable? Or Tesla? Or Amazon?
Are we really still doing this nonsense? If Open AI wanted to become profitable they could do it inside of 12 months - growing companies don't care about profitability (nor should they)
All currently known profitable use-cases are competing on price. All the unicorn examples you're biased for had in their pitch deck the network effect of being the largest.
OpenAI, Grok, etc, have shown no unique value prop or an idea with monopoly potential.
OpenAI is currently in an explicit non-profit seeking mode using a technology that we have demonstrated 10-100x or greater decreases in compute to achieve the same outcomes.
This is not a declaration that OpenAI will become wildly profitable. This is just me saying that these aren't comparable companies.
[0]: https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/06/altman_gpt_profits/
https://sacra.com/research/cursor-at-100m-arr/
Sounds legit.
I assume you're referring to this:
https://sacra.com/research/cursor-at-100m-arr/
It went from 10M MRR to 100M
Google gives everyone free access to a good spreadsheet tool, even though Microsoft Office exists.
Web browsers are free, despite the value of the entire internet.
Compilers are free, despite the value of all software collectively.
LLMs being really valuable doesn't automatically mean anyone can get rich from them.
I think everyone last year parroting "moat!" was cringe (like Altman of all people wouldn't know about this already, c'mon), but you do actually need something that other people don't have. I expect Altman's already got stuff in mind, but he's hardly the only one, and that means it's a game of "which multibillionaire with lots of experience building companies will win?", and that's hard for non-skilled normies (in this case incluing me) to guess.
Re: Dropbox, from a well known user. It didn't age well and we've been asked not to repeat it because it makes the author with connections to this site's operator look bad.
> 1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
the controversy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27067281
