OpenAI, valued at $157 billion, isn't profitable. Should that be normal?
OpenAI, valued at $157 billion, isn't profitable. Should that be normal?
Maybe companies should be judged on their ability to effect change rather than hard dollars-and-cents.
Capitalism doesn't sell performance. It sell 'potential' and 'perceived gains'.
I sell my dates on my potential wealth and potential penis size. People need to get on the capitalism grindset.
And women sell dates on their potential to do that thing that was discussed but then try to backtrack by pretending they thought it was a joke and didn't even bring a banana.
"Both my cock and my investment portfolio are well positioned to overperform both ongoing quarterly and year over year growth as compared to standard cocks and investment portfolios, should volatility continue to remain close to historical averages."
Breakdown of how this doesn't actually mean anything, because I'm autistic:
This doesn't actually mean anything.
"Well positioned to do X" just means 'could happen'.
It doesn't actually promise any outsized gains at all, it ascribes no likelihood to this scenario, it does not quantify anything, at all, and it even conditions the potential hypothetical gains on a the vaguely defined condition of volatility remaining 'close' to 'historical averages', again totally unquantified.
This would be dubious to expect to continue in perpetuity and without deviation, because both for the market and for people's interpersonal lives, the extremely normal pattern is that volatilty remains within 'normal' bounds for a while, but will also predictably have short but highly intense bursts from time to time.
So these entirely predictable volatility bursts break the condition.
... But to someone with less knowledge of or experience with both markets and relationships, it seems good that something is well positioned to exceed standard growth, it seems reasonable that things will stay close to historical averages, so the 'vibe' takeaway is positive, and the mentioned (potential but utterly without basis) outsized growth was both in the short term and enduring year over year!
Even though the actual content of what was said is literally nothing beyond jargon laden flim flam that has no ultimate literal meaning, nor legal liability.
No.
Aka why not to have headlines in the form of a question.
AKA Betteridge's law of headlines.
Finance bros who run wall street are all idiots, so they designed a system where no matter how stupid they are, they're always right. If you get a bunch of finance bros in a room and give a really good sales pitch, your valuation can triple despite nothing real actually happening.
In the case of AI, even the foremost experts are uncertain about how useful AI is. Qualified people disagree and no AI based tool has really proved itself to be robust, but it is amazing at fooling people who are either dumb or willfully ignorant, so it's like crack cocaine to anyone who works on Wall Street.
That's because it's just gambling.
With extra steps.
It shouldn't be, but it is. 20 years ago, in the far-off year of 2005, a lot of tech companies more or less followed the same path, where it took decades for them to actually be profitable, if they were at all.
YouTube ran at a deficit for something close to 15 years. AI companies are likely following this trend, and running mostly on investment money, rather than being self-sufficient.
Tech companies were in that boat in the late 90s as well.
The dot com bust deflated it somewhat, but somehow the industry got right back to it within a couple of years.
I don't know about now, but Amazon ran a deficit for pretty much its entire existence. Amazon is a bit different though since it was part of an R&D strategy and they could've stepped off the gas at almost any point and been profitable.
Pretty sure youtube still runs on deficit. Storage costs alone would probably bankrupt some small countries.
People don't realise how much the storage and bandwidth costs are for a site as big as YouTube, and it keeps going up due to the huge number of videos being uploaded. People think that Google are making huge amounts of money from YouTube. In reality, they're not breaking even and rely on other, profitable business units (like their Workspace and cloud services) to subsidize it.
There's no way the ads fully cover the cost, and more and more people are blocking ads. Advertisers don't pay for blocked ads, and YouTubers don't make any ad money from your views if you use an ad blocker. (this is the main reason YouTubers say they make less money from ads than they used to - ad blockers)
Gotta keep in mind, profit can always be distorted based on how much employees are getting paid.
Someone is making money. In fact, a lot of people are.
Totally normal. Just keep throwing stupid amounts of money at it so it can find a way to undercut some existing business structure by operating at a loss until that business is dead and then enshittify. Profit! /s
So now we are actually to the point where we can ask if a corporation or more widely anything at all has any value if it makes no profit.
There are people in the world who by luck of birth or circumstance have amassed obscene wealth and they after the fact are trying to convince everyone that profit is the only thing of value. These are the real public enemies.
This is the post-scarcity shift. This is how it happens.
We need to take, by force, those who have too much and give it to those who have too little.
They will be kicking and screaming. That means we're doing something right, because they are not our allies.
A company can have value without making profit. It can own assets. It has value in its staff.
Now should it have a valuation like OpenAI? Fuck no!
As a major investor into Open AI future, I'd gladly exchange all my non-existing stakes for a blowjob by fugly Sam Altman. It wouldn't turn into any profits, but for some time, he'd have something in his mouth that isn't a lie or a sketchy promo. I believe, some on Open AI board would even pay me to keep him silent.
That's how every single company targeting consumer market in the web started. No profit for many years. Majority because of scale of the market. Facebook started making profit after 2012 so for 8 years they were burning money figuring out where to sell their soul to. Now the scale and risk for OpenAI is way bigger, because they have not sold their users fully or we don't know if they sold it and for exchange for what. It would be funny if they at some point alter their privacy policy and turn out to sell people's chats to advertising agencies. They might also go bankrupt or turned out to be a scam that hires thousands of people to answer questions.
if you're mad at this, don't look at how much xai is worth.
ai is basically just a pump and dump for rich people before the bubble bursts
How is it pump and dump? These companies aren't publicly traded.
pretty typical with tech companies, people get too optimistic sometimes
People want to jump on the bandwagon and assume they know everything about new technology.
It's really easy to take advantage of these laymen with things like traveling to mars or... building underground highways of tubes so people can use transportation like those bank chutes.
I hope one day, we as a species can recognize these patterns so that we may take steps to break them.
We don't need some "big new tech" to solve the world's problems. We need to turn around and help out our fellow man who has less than us. We have the tools, just not the desire.
It's a cultural problem.
It’s typical for tech companies to organize as nonprofits and then restructure because they are losing cash?
Not sure if I’m misunderstanding you or what part you think is typical
It's typical for tech companies to reorganize because they are losing cash, yes.
absolutely should. america lives in an idiocracy. a trump meme coin could be valued at 100trillion $ and thats fine. if you want feudalism with extra steps, this is exactly that. go buy some golden sneakers and maybe they'll be worth a million some time or not.
You know when you're playing a game and you think this is kinda dumb sure my gun now does 100 more damage but the baddies have 100 more health so really nothing has changed? But it still makes you feel better because well, it's 100 more.
I think that's how these valuations work.
Yeah, but not for shitty companies. I'm down to invest in a mom and pop if it helps get it off the ground. Fuck pump and dumps, and people who inflate bubbles.
Spotify hasn't made a profit at all since its inception afaik.
No way with their user base being so massive they are net loss. Can't be true
Spotify on Tuesday said it anticipates reaching profitability for the full year in 2024, which would mark the company's first full profitable year since it launched 18 years ago.
https://www.axios.com/2024/11/13/spotify-projects-first-full-year-of-profitability-ever
Labels take %70 of royalties, leaving Spotify %30. Also they dropped a lot of momey into podcasts. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/spotify-statistics/
It's a "pure play"
Fuck no it should never be normal. Its against true business. If there wasn't so much money in the system then a business would have to actually run like a real business.
No.
Yes and it should be worse. OpenAI should be forced to take on the cost of compensating every copyright holder it exploited. If that means OpenAI doesn’t exist I’m absolutely okay with that.
People always act like "how can company A be a thing when it isn't profitable". It isn't about if company A is profitable. It's about whether CEO A is making money. As long as that can happen and, you know, others at the top, company A is right on track.
Chat GPT= Email Grammar Check.
Isn't it a private company? They could say it's worth infinity trillion dollars...
No, not quite. They're funded by venture capitalists, who put money into investment rounds on the understanding (speculative gamble?) that the company will have a given future value. The last funding round was $6.6bn on the basis that the company will be worth $157bn when it is floated on the stock market. Ed Zitron has quite a good analysis on his page, and also why their business is a complete pile of shite: