Capitalism doesn't sell performance. It sell 'potential' and 'perceived gains'.
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2025
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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.
"I have a great venture Idea for you Susan. What if, and hear me out, what if my penis was at least average size! I already have an investor lined up in the bedroom, you'd be crazy to pass on this opportunity"
It's what we in the biz would refer to as a "grower", which is in contrast to a "shower".
If you’re gonna sell dates you better be a grower! Dates don’t just grow themselves!
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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.
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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.
That's a long established myth. Amazon started out in 94, and became profitable in like 10 years. Most of their hardcore R&D is self-financed cause they generate just that much free cash.
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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)
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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.
Altman has since said the company is losing money on its $200-per-month Pro subscriptions, which offer limitless access to its most recent model, OpenAI o1, and to its video generator, Sora AI. "People use it much more than we expected," he wrote in a post on X.
It's ridiculous. More people use the product, so they're losing money? What. That's the complete opposite of what a business is.
Not to mention the environmental damage they've been doing for close to no positive results.
It's not more people using the product, it's the limited population who are paying $200/month use it way more than they thought they would. So the costs per person paying that are going way over $200/month. Basically, they made the mistake of setting a fuck off price that was too low and a bunch of people did the math and took them up on the offer.
If the product costs that much to run, and most users aren’t abusing their access, it’s possible the product isn’t profitable at any price that enough users are willing to pay.
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Because the people that innovate do not care for business and are not good at it, but everything in this world we created has to be sold so there is always this initial mismatch before the business graduate vultures, who innovate nothing descend on it, beg control and then go way too far in the opposite direction. At that late point the only innovation will be a slightly more rounded set of icons on the website.
I almost shat myself in half when I saw how much water is needed for cooling for every prompt
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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.
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.
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.
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
I'm really excited about your explanation how a pump and dump is going to work when openAI is not even publicly traded. So who's gonna pump and dump what exactly?
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Same goes for Tesla, it's severely over bloated even if it's bubble has shrunk a bit.
These sort of bubbles should be stopped by the government but why stop that if the politicians themselves are the ones having pumped millions into these bubbles?
First you gotta make a law prohibiting politicians from having stocks, then watch how fast this problem gets resolved
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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.
The history of the Internet and computers in general is full of investors willing to take seemingly insane chances on overvalued speculative ventures.
Private equity is so pumped full of cash that they basically have nothing better to do with it.
I should fucking hope OpenAI isn’t profitable.
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.
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