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I’m genuinely curious: have we seen profit (not revenue) increases from these companies buying these GPUs and deploying AI models? What’s an AI product that’s
by endisneigh 3y ago
I’m genuinely curious: have we seen profit (not revenue) increases from these companies buying these GPUs and deploying AI models?
What’s an AI product that’s actually making a lot of money (profit)? I cannot find reliable stats on how much profit OpenAI actually generates.
- kratosatreus 3y agoJust like anything these days, profit comes when they bring the inference and hosting costs down. VCs are playing the scale game with AI companies
- fnordpiglet 3y agoI wouldn’t expect anything meaningful at what is essentially a year and a half into the practical build cycle. Top to bottom nothing is optimized, use cases not fully established. There’s an awful lot of FUD on HN about this being like crypto. In a decade of trying I never found a meaningful and practical use case for crypto beyond “HODL.” For generative AI we are finding immediately useful applications under nearly every rock we turn over, with increasingly powerful results. These aren’t speculative, they’re allowing us to do things at scales we couldn’t imagine a few years ago. I’m seeing this with most my professional network involved in high end tech. The tool chains suck, and we are limited by GPU capacity as well as inference costs, but these are short term constraints. As patterns solidify the tool chains will too, GPU capacity is ramping up rapidly, and there are plenty of optimizations on the horizon. I for one see this much more akin to the gold rush of the internet over the 1994-2020 time frame in super fast motion. Will we overshoot? Absolutely. But the effect is real.
- NewJazz 3y agoLotta words to answer no. I also would challenge your "year and a half" timeline... Gen ai has been around.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoYes, but not practically useful in general cases prior to GPT4 level models.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y agoand you'll be saying that about GPT5 when it comes out to. This is what hype looks like.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoYou can choose to believe what you choose. However I’m working with these things at a senior tech lead level at a megacorp and what I’m doing is actually really real, with real material benefits. I don’t know that another order of magnitude performance improvement would matter as much to me as better tooling, performance, context, lower costs, and higher GPU capacity. But if it does, 1000% I’ll be hyping it. I hype things that work and dismiss things that don’t, that’s what an engineer is supposed to do.
- NewJazz 3y agoOK... So care to share what that benefit looks like? This whole thread was about asking for concrete examples of generative AI's utility.
- humansareok1 3y agoGive an LLM the text of a PDF document. Ask the model to extract values in the document or in tables. Input the values into a spreadsheet. This is at minimum a task which costs companies around the world Hundreds of Millions of dollars a year.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y agowhat you're describing is automation and companies have been doing it for years.
- YetAnotherNick 3y agoOpenAI is in loss, they just raised one round few days back. My guess is that they are at least burning $5B based on the amounts they are raising.
- NewJazz 3y agoI think the commenter was asking if OAI's customers are profitable.
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y agoOpenAI is also basically in the "selling shovels" business. In their case the shovel is an LLM. It's up to their customers to find something profitable to do with it.
- aurareturn 3y agoI think they’re positioning themselves as the Apple or Android. I equate their foundational models such as GPT to the iPhone. You can build on top of their ecosystem of models. Everyone else are just app makers using their foundational models as the base. It wouldn’t surprise me if they want to build an App Store on top of ChatGPT and take 30% eventually.
- AzzyHN 3y agoTech companies are all about revenue, and hoping to replicate Amazon
- dorkwood 3y agoI think it will be like blockchain integration where it takes a few years to really start showing its value.
- chii 3y agoso far, i haven't seen any value resulting from blockchain integration.
- dorkwood 3y agoLast I heard the Australian stock market was upgrading its settlement system (CHESS) to use blockchain technology. So they clearly see value in it.
- dorkwood 3y agoSorry, I looked into this and it seems like the ASX abandoned their blockchain integration project. In the end, they spent over $150 million trying to get it to work. This was not a good example to use, and I apologize.
- xnx 3y agoBlockchain is at least 15 years old, if it was useful it wouldn't take so much effort to convince people it is useful.