this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2026
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. No politics
    • If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
    • A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS

If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.

Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.

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[–] Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Both open AI and anthropic are making a profit on inference / api usage. So if you're using Claude code and burning through millions of tokens they're making money off that. The revenue from this is also growing rapidly.

What's dragging down the bottom line is training, which is the big money sink. They have to do it though to make the next biggest model to compete with each other. They're hoping that they'll hit a plateau in capabilities, whether that be AGI or some government regulation, so they don't have to train any more. At that point they can sit back and collect billions from the inference money printer.

[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 week ago

I could be wrong, but I don't think that's what the question was about.

It was "if people are trying to use Anthropic or OpenAI's services to build a profitable company, why wouldn't Anthropic or OpenAI just build that company themselves"

And the answer there would be lack of subject matter experts. You need people who know the industry they're building the product for if you want to have any fighting chance. AI can work as a force multiplier, trying to use it as a completely autonomous agent that gets near-zero human feedback is hopeless. I doubt any of the AI companies want to take on thousands of employees just to use their own AI to take risks on new industries when they could just sell the AI to people who take on the risk.