this post was submitted on 26 May 2026
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[–] Doomsider@lemmy.world 12 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

They barely have launched anything and they are already enshitifying their offerings. I think this says what everyone is thinking. No, they are nowhere near profitable and large scale deployment may not be profitable for a long time.

It took AWS nine years to become profitable. It appears that AI may take a decade or more. How they plan on surviving when they are already taking away features and putting hard limits on usage is anybody's guess.

[–] partofthevoice@lemmy.zip 12 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

Not just that… I’m suspicious that some of them are already implementing inference inefficiencies because they profit more from inference. So if you can make someone’s question consume more tokens, you earn more income per query.

Edit: found example conversation here https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/14593#issuecomment-4523777147

[–] woelkchen@lemmy.world 27 points 12 hours ago (3 children)

For hardware manufacturers like Nvidia: Massively.

[–] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 hour ago

They're the ones selling shovels during the gold rush

[–] kbobabob@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 12 hours ago

Yeah, companies are making money from AI, but AI isn't making money... Yet

[–] VibeSurgeon@piefed.social 2 points 12 hours ago

As noted in the post

[–] theherk@lemmy.world 36 points 14 hours ago

That nvidia one is probably impossible to pin down, since it is really just a big ouroboros investment human centipede eating its own revenue out of all the other asses.

[–] Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org 23 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

This, and https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/ give me real hope for our Internet to come back someday.

[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 9 points 11 hours ago (1 children)
[–] Chulk@lemmy.ml 7 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

I'll never understand how devs get so confident in their product that they will provoke hackers/attackers. I wouldn't even have that level of confidence even after an independent audit lmao

Edit: also what kind of dumbass makes an April fools joke about their own product being compromised. Amateur shit.

[–] village604@adultswim.fan 2 points 2 hours ago

It's like people sending their locks to Lock Picking Lawyer hoping for cheap advertising.

[–] magnue@lemmy.world 26 points 15 hours ago

Assumedly Nvidia is just dumping all its profits back into these companies

[–] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 16 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

I really thought today would be the day guys

I guess I just need to invest more into AI. What if we took the funding for hospitals and converted them into diesel generators to power more chips bought for well above cost?

[–] Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

Can we feed small children into the diesel generators?

[–] SillyMe@piefed.social 1 points 2 hours ago

with ~~block chain~~ AI all things are possible

[–] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 8 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

I think that would cannibalize labour from the coal mines.

We could do the elderly though.

[–] muse@piefed.blahaj.zone 5 points 13 hours ago

HypnoDrones released, currency now irrelevant

[–] areakode@riskeratspizza.com 9 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (2 children)

I think they're hoping AI will eventually get smart enough to make itself do stuff. Sorta like a fusion reactor: you get it jump started with billions of taxpayer money, and eventually it will start spitting out hundred dollar bills!

  • Step 1: Destroy the environment with millions of unnecessary datacenters.
  • Step 2: ???
  • Step 3: Profit!
[–] Flower@sh.itjust.works 8 points 11 hours ago

Step 2: after the bubble pops buy everything for pennies on the dollar. repurpose AI and datacenters for extremely invasive surveillance network and sell data and services to totalitarian governments

[–] Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 13 hours ago

Dude, just buy a printer! /j

[–] Eternal192@anarchist.nexus 9 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

The only thing about AI that interests me is when are we going to make it go away?

[–] village604@adultswim.fan 0 points 1 hour ago

It's not going anywhere, unfortunately.

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 2 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

This seems somewhat misleading. Lots of products take a lot of investment in them for many years before they reach profitability. The Boeing 787 Dreamliner, for example, was in development for 7 years and another three years after that before it was profitable. The Falcon 9 rocket took 13 years to develop and now it's the most profitable satellite launcher around. The Dyson bag-free cyclonic vacuum cleaner took 15 years to develop.

Most of this AI stuff has only been in heavy development since ChatGPT burst upon the scene in 2023. It's not unreasonable to see the industry still heavily into the investment and development side of things.

[–] Badabinski@kbin.earth 6 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Building a jet doesn't require over a trillion dollars of capex, and selling jets is profitable. There's solid evidence that inference isn't profitable, and the AI labs need inference to be extremely profitable if they're going to meet their absolutely ludicrous contractual performance targets. Oracle is expecting hundreds of billions of dollars from OpenAI by like 2030. That shit is not happening.

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 1 points 8 hours ago

Whether inference is profitable or not is not a global yes/no question. It depends heavily on the circumstances, what you're using it for and what you're charging for it. A lot of the money being invested in research right now is going into making inference cheaper, which would of course make it more profitable to sell at current price points. Or just run it yourself, local models are getting quite capable these days.

I wouldn't bet on any specific company being the ones to survive this, especially not first-movers like OpenAI. More likely they'll spend their money blazing the trail and the ones to profit from it will be the ones who followed along behind. When a company goes bankrupt it doesn't poof out of existence, its assets get sold off at pennies on the dollar and then whoever bought those assets gets a chance at running them without the overhead of the previous company's debt.

[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 4 points 11 hours ago

That's true but the pricing doesn't match the expense by a long shot. The question is - what is going to give out first? Capital, or the all-you-can-eat pricing? (and yes the latter is closing as we speak)