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>It's be a >$10bn business already. But not profitable yet.
by tonyedgecombe 2y ago
>It's be a >$10bn business already.
But not profitable yet.
- miohtama 2y agoFor comparison, Uber is still not profitable after 15 years or so. Give it some time.
- Tepix 2y agoTime for them to finally disappear
- jefftk 2y agoUber had their first profitable year in 2023, and their profit margin was 22% in 2024. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/uber-technologies-full-2024-earnings-132735851.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/uber-technologies-full-2024-e...
- datavirtue 2y agoThey are still FAR in the red. Technically have never turned a profit. Among other famous companies.
- jefftk 2y agoI'm not a finance person, but how is net income of $9.9B for FY 2024 not profit?
- ecedeno 2y agoI assume they mean the profits in the past couple years are dwarfed by the losses that came before. Looking at the company's entire history, instead of a single FY.
- jefftk 2y agoMaybe? But that's not what anyone means when they describe a company as profitable or not. I was guessing they meant something like the net profit only came from a weird tax thing or something.
- UncleEntity 2y agoSeems like the difference between a profitable investment and a profitable company. They invested tens of billions of dollars in destroying the competition to be able to recently gain a return on that investment. One could either write off that previous spending or calculate it into the totality of "Uber". I don't know how Silicon Valley economics works but, presumably, a lot of that previous spending is now in the form of debt which must be serviced out of the current profits. Not that I'm stating that taking on debt is wrong or anything.
- jefftk 2y agoTo the extent that their past spending was debt, interest on that debt that should already be accounted for in calculating their net income. But the way it usually works for Silicon Valley companies and other startups is that instead of taking on debt they raise money through selling equity. This is money that doesn't have to be paid back, but it means investors own a large portion of this now-profitable company.
- sib 2y agoUber is a profitable company both in 2023 and - to the tune of billions of dollars - in 2024. Please read their financials if you doubt this statement.
- wkat4242 2y agoI'm surprised. They pay the drivers a pittance. My ex drove Uber for a while and it wasn't really worth it. Also, for the customers it's usually more expensive and slower than a normal taxi at least here in Spain. The original idea of ride-sharing made sense but just like airbnb it became an industry and got enshittified.
- ghaff 2y agoMy sense in London is that they’re pretty comparable. I’ll use whichever is more convenient.
- wkat4242 2y agoThey're usually a bit more expensive here than a taxi. It can be beneficial because sometimes they have deals, and I sometimes take one when I have to book it in advance or when I'm afraid there will be delays with a corrsponding high cost. Though Uber tend to hit me with congestion charges then too. At least with a taxi I can ask them to take a different route. The problem with the uber drivers is that they don't know any of the street names here, they just follow the app's navigation. Whereas taxi drivers tend to be much more aware and know the streets and often come up with suggestions. This also means that they sometimes fleece tourists but when they figure you know the city well they don't dare :) Often if they take one wrong turn I make a scene about frowning and looking out of the window and then they quickly get back on track. Of course that's another usecase where uber would be better, if you don't know the city you're in.
- fragmede 2y ago> they sometimes fleece tourists yeah thanks no, I'm paying for an Uber. For all the complaints over Ubers business practices, it's hard not to forget how bad taxis were. Regulatory capture is a clear failure mode of capitalism and the free market and that is no more shown than by the taxis cab industry.
- wkat4242 2y ago
- fpoling 2y agoOpera browser was not profitable for like 15 years and still became rather profitable eventually to make an attractive target to purchase by external investors. And even if not bough it would still made nice profit eventually for the original investors.
- darkwater 2y agoOpera is a shady advertisers cesspool since it was purchased.
- behnamoh 2y agoYou can't burn money in AI for 15 years on the off chance that it’ll pay off.
- kcatskcolbdi 2y agoIt seems like most people are on the road to doing exactly this.
- bigyabai 2y agoI dunno, Nvidia worked on machine learning for 11+ years and it worked out great for them: https://research.nvidia.com/research-area/machine-learning-artificial-intelligence https://research.nvidia.com/research-area/machine-learning-a...
- tsimionescu 2y agoSure, but they were making tons of money elsewhere. OpenAI has no source of revenue anywhere big enough to cover its expenses, it's just burning investor cash at the moment.
- tom_m 2y agoNo, but you can let others burn money for 15 years and then come in and profit off their work while they go under.
- snackernews 2y ago
- amelius 2y agoThe demand is there. People are already becoming addicted to this stuff.
- ghaff 2y agoI think the HN crowd widely overestimates how many people are even passingly familiar with the LLM landscape much less use any of the tools regularly.
- amelius 2y agoWell, they said it is a $10B industry. Not sure how they measure it, but it counts for something, I suppose.
- kcatskcolbdi 2y agoI think you may be underestimating it. At this point in college, LLMs are everywhere. It's completely dominating history/english/mass comm fields with respect to writing papers. Anecdotally all of my working non-tech friends use chatgpt daily.
- ghaff 2y agoIt does anecdotally seem to be very common in education which presumably will carry over to professional workplaces over time. I see it a lot less in non-tech and even tech/adjacent adults today.
- datavirtue 2y agoMy wife, the farthest you can get from the HN crowd, literally goes to tears when faced with Excel or producing a Word doc and she is a regular user of copilot and absolutely raves about it. Very unusual for her to take up new tech like this and put it to use but she uses it for everything now. Horse is out of the barn.
- UncleEntity 2y ago> My wife, the farthest you can get from the HN crowd... She is literally married into the HN crowd. I think the real AI breakthrough is how to monetize the high usage users.