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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25716 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

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The thing no one seems to be talking about with respect to AI is how the underlying economics of it all are so mind-numbingly bad that a crash is inevitable. I have no idea when this crash is going to happen, but if I had to fathom a guess it will be some time within the next five years. We're talking about a technology that has already burned at least half a trillion dollars and has plans to burn another half trillion with no model for profitability in sight. There's only so long that the flow of venture capital will keep coming before the investors start expecting some kind of return. Add in the fact that Nvidia currently represents about 8% of the total value of the S&P 500 based on sales of graphics cards to a single, unprofitable company, and the economic picture looks even more dire.

Almost every claim in this paragraph is incorrect. Every model Openai has trained was profitable, gpt3 and gpt4 both almost certainly made back their training cost. They are pouring an incredible amount more into R&D of course, but that's kind of the point, the market for this stuff is actually red hot. And I genuinely have no clue why you think NVidia only sells to one company, estimates put the amount of chips sold to microsoft(including openai) at 23% of nvidia sales, google at 12%, amazon at 13%, meta at 11%, and Xai at around 10%.

I don’t understand it, but there are a crazy number of tech companies purchasing calls to (outdated versions of?) GPT. The corporate market is definitely hot.

Can either of you actually point at some numbers with respect to profitability?

We don't have access to specific numbers. We know that GPT-3 cost somewhere around $5 million in compute to train and that openai's revenue in 2020 and 2021 while it and it's derivatives before 3.5 were their primary product that their revenue was $3.5 million and $28 million. As you get to the era of many competing models and then need to factor in what their actual margin on revenue is it becomes more muddled after that but their projected revenue for 2025 is $12 Billion and the trend looks exponential. Maybe adoption and usage falls off but the doom and gloom that they aren't finding buyers is just kind of nonsense.

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