• Soleos@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    5 hours ago

    Fuck AI, it’s a bubble, etc. But I do wonder how much of the spending is actual revenue-generating operating costs and how much is further investment/R&D. I doubt Sam Altman sees spending Microsoft’s billions on whatever tf he wants as a loss.

  • rumba@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    6 hours ago

    Considering how many trillions quietly went into the field, I expect that’s a LOT lower than real numbers.

  • Doorknob@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    20
    ·
    13 hours ago

    Who wants to give me a billion dollars to dig a hole and I’ll give you a billion to fill it back in and we’ll both say to investors we posted a billion dollars in revenue.

  • gergo@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    17 hours ago

    Just exploitative market grab for early dominance. (Or: “Grift” lol.) They will make it back when all of us have no choice but use chatgpt for everything.

      • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        13
        ·
        15 hours ago

        technically according to NSPM-7 any FOSS is terroristic by nature because it’s anticapitalist.

        that means if you have contributed to FOSS at any time, you are a terrorist. technically.

        • Stitch0815@feddit.org
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          14 hours ago

          I know this is not a real discussion :D

          But I don’t think FOSS is inherently anticapitalist. It’s just not late stage capitalism. There are plenty of commercial FOSS projects.

          Sure you could compile them from source or download somones executable. But especially companies often want convenience, customer support and LTS versions.

          • definitemaybe@lemmy.ca
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            edit-2
            2 hours ago

            There are, of course, open source licenses that don’t allow for commercial use without a license.

            Also, there are lots of industries that need guarantees about the software, and even CC0 open source software doesn’t come with those guarantees; those come from a commercial use and support contact.

    • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      68
      ·
      23 hours ago

      Well actually there is a long and rich history of companies that are able to operate at a loss using funds appropriated from sale of shares to investors, and this process continues so long as new investors keep buying in such that anybody selling out is covered by the new funds until enough people try to sell out that the price starts to plunge, although the collapse can be delayed by the company strategically buying back and occasionally splitting or reorganizing, meaning everyone gets their money back unless they sell too late.

      You know.

      A fucking Ponze Scheme.

    • Tiresia@slrpnk.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      22
      ·
      23 hours ago

      Oh honey, that hasn’t been true since 2008.

      The government will bail out companies that get too big to fail. So investors want to loan money to companies so that those companies become too big to fail, so that when those investors “collect on their debt with interest” the government pays them.

      They funded Uber, which lost 33 billion dollars over the course of 7 years before ever turning a profit, but by driving taxi companies out of business and lobbying that public transit is unnecessary, they’re an unmissable part of society, so investors will get their dues.

      They funded Elon Musk, whose companies are the primary means of communication between politicians and the public, a replacing NASA as the US government’s primary space launch provider for both civilian and military missions, and whose prestige got a bunch of governments to defund public transit to feed continued dependence on car companies. So investors will get their dues through military contracts and through being able to threaten politicians with a media blackout.

      And so they fund AI, which they’re trying to have replace so many essential functions that society can’t run without it, and which muddies the waters of anonymous interaction to the point that people have no choice but to only rely on information that has been vetted by institutions - usually corporations like for-profit news.

      The point of AI is not to make itself so desirable that people want to give AI companies money to have it in their life. The point of AI is to make people more dependent on AI and on other corporations that the AI company’s owners own.

  • J52@lemmy.nz
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    17 hours ago

    It’s not small change anymore. That’s what happens when you don’t listen to your customers.