AI is a commodity but the big players are losing money for every query sent. Even at the $200/month subscription level.
Tech valuations are based on scaling. ARPU grows with every user added. It costs the same to serve 10 users vs 100 users, etc. ChatGPT, Gemini, copilot, Claude all cost more the more they’re used. That’s the bubble.
Theres openAI, google and meta (american), mistral (French), alibaba and deepseek (china). Many more smaller companies that either make their own models or further finetune specialized models from the big ones
Which ones are not actively spending an amount of money that scales directly with the number of users?
I’m talking about the general-purpose LLM AI bubble , wherein people are expected to return tremendous productivity improvements by using a LLM, thus justifying the obscene investment. Not ML as a whole. There’s a lot there, such as the work your colleagues are doing.
But it’s being treated as the equivalent of electricity, and it is not.
ChatGPT loses money on every query their premium subscribers submit. They lose money when people use copilot, which they resell to Microsoft. And it’s not like they’re going to make it up on volume - heavy users are significantly more costly.
This isn’t unique to ChatGPT.
Yes, it has its uses; no, it cannot continue in the way it has so far. Is it worth more than $200/month to you? Microsoft is tearing up datacenter deals. I don’t know what the future is, but this ain’t it.
ETA I think that management gets the most benefit, by far, and that’s why there’s so much talk about it. I recently needed to lead a meeting and spent some time building the deck with a LLM; took me 20 min to do something otherwise would have taken over an hour. When that is your job alongside responding to emails, it’s easy to see the draw. Of course, many of these people are in Bullshit Jobs.
I guess you didn’t see the several points in the article where they make it clear that it is “opt in”?
I do look forward for the bursting of the LLM bubble, but the article isn’t just about LLM.
There’s no way he’s 100kg.
Ben Thompson has been saying that they need to collect user data (like google) for a decade.
It seems the botched Apple Intelligence release changed some minds, a little bit.
It can be tough but you can usually tell if the plant has balls before they open and fertilize the neighbourhood. Males grow droopy round sacs.
Bummer.
Someone needs to learn how to sex their cannabis and kill male plants. Jfc.
I personally hate crocs, but I don’t work in healthcare. I have a friend who loves them.
There’s a specific workplace line for things like healthcare. Probably can’t autoclave them but you can use a liquid disinfectant.
You do want to avoid most running shoes. Narrow toe boxes, upturned toes, too much heel, and too much foam are all bad for your feet.
No, that’s the thing. There’s still significant expenditure to simply respond to a query. It’s not like Facebook where it costs $1 million to build it and $0.10/month for every additional user. It’s $1billion to build and $1 per query. There’s no recouping the cost at scale like previous tech innovation. The more use it gets, the more it costs to run, in a straight line, not asymptotically.