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On the other hand: ChatGPT is the fastest-growing consumer product in history.
by coreyh14444 2y ago
On the other hand: ChatGPT is the fastest-growing consumer product in history.
- xutopia 2y agoBut as the article suggests it's not making it profitable.
- coreyh14444 2y agoI was around in 1999 when we had this conversation the first time. People openly mocked Google for throwing money down the well. It was a search engine! People Clicked away from Google. They were fools, it was unsustainable, etc etc. Then adwords launched and we know the rest of that story.
- jsheard 2y ago> Then adwords launched and we know the rest of that story. I guess the moral of that story is that OpenAI may be profitable once they start injecting Temu ads into ChatGPT responses. Profitability, but at what cost? They appear to already be working on something along those lines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41658837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41658837
- Shog9 2y agoThen you also remember all the other companies that threw money down the well in '99 and didn't pull a rabbit out of their hats in time. Throwing money away isn't the clever bit in the Google story.
- cma 2y agoGoogle did become more an more of a portal though offering weather etc. to keep you from clicking away. Carasols of their own YouTube property videos at the top of each result. Amp links similar to AOL keywords running their own ads inside most of the time, etc.
- __loam 2y agoYou say this but Google has far better retention than openAI does.
- scarface_74 2y agoOr you could cite the thousands of companies that died with a whispers It’s called Survivorship bias
- pornel 2y agoYou're talking about the dotcom bubble! A time in history where enormous amounts of money were thrown down enormous amounts of overhyped wells, and almost all of them turned out to be stupidly bad business. People mocking that waste of money were 99% right, and Google is one of the very few exceptions.
- airstrike 2y agoEarly stage companies care more about growth than profitability. Looking at this arbitrary chart from a quick search[1], OpenAI is likely still at the "young growth" stage [1] https://vlp.teju-finance.com/courses/pluginfile.php/1844/mod_book/chapter/895/cash%20flows%20and%20life%20cycle.png https://vlp.teju-finance.com/courses/pluginfile.php/1844/mod...
- minimaxir 2y agoLoss-leaders tend to grow fast. More importantly, you need a moat to benefit from being a loss-leader and get back to profitability, which OpenAI does not have.
- loandbehold 2y agoChatGPT is the best foundational model. The barrier of entry is high because of high compute costs.
- minimaxir 2y agoHaving the best model, which is debatable even in GPT-4o's case, is not a moat.
- mjamesaustin 2y agoBut if training the model is building the moat, and doing so is highly unprofitable, then the only way for OpenAI to maintain its moat is to continue training better models than the competition, each of which will cost even more money to train and push them further into the red.
- mechagodzilla 2y agoA company giving away money for free could probably beat them (and might lose less money per customer than OpenAI).
- makingstuffs 2y agoThere are more people alive today than there ever has been and those people, generally, have a better means of keeping up to date with new tech/consumer products. Both of those two points alone emphasise the fact that comparing the accelerated growth of a tech company in 2024 to the likes of a Sega Megadrive in the 90s, for example, isn’t a like for like comparison.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]