It's a weird business where everyone is offering an environmentally unsupportable service at below cost, hoping to outlive the competition.
Market share of a negative profit market.
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2026
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It worked for netflix and the steaming services. Now terrestrial (cable) is dead and adsupported streaming tiers have returned lol.
It's how every tech company that "disrupts" a market or indistry works. Uber started of burning shit tons of cash operating at a loss till it replaced enough Taxi services then jacked up the prices.
The problem with AI is that they cannot increase the prices enough to be profitable. The AI companies are waiting for future hardware tech that will be energy efficient enough to make AI profitable before they run out of capital to burn.
The problem with AI is that they cannot increase the prices enough to be profitable.
I saw something about the SpaceX IPO that said for it to be justified at that price, everyone on earth with some sort of money (they defined it as earning at least $14,000/year) had to become an xAI consumer and spend $28,000/year. Seems reasonable /s
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I was thinking about that, but it did make governments move to digital programming (eg BBC, NPO), which they likely wouldn't have done if it wasn't for Netflix. I think it also improved the internet speeds here in NL significantly.
That's not correct - the BBC announced iPlayer in 2003, tested 2004 onwards and finally launched in 2007 after being delayed by lobbying. The iPlayer was held back from full launch due to concerns from commercial competitors - in particular broadband providers lobbied against the iPlayer service because they feared the "pressure" it would put on the broadband infrastructure.
Netflix launched their streaming service in 2007.
Netflix did not originate the idea of streaming (nor did the BBC to be clear), much like Apple didn't originate the smart phone. Netfiix did however do it better than it's competitors, particularly the incumbents in the commercial sector.
I remember iPlayer in 2007: it was a mess, using DRM and P2P, requiring a full download before watching it. I wouldn't call that a streaming service at all. Shows had to be watched within a week of broadcasting.
I welcome feedback but starting a comment with 'thats not correct' and then blatantly being incorrect is just some ol' bullshit.
I never mentioned that either of the companies originated the idea of streaming. I only posited that Netflix pushed governments (in this case the Dutch and UK) to move to digital programming.
Painful memories of drm do come haunting back, but I do wonder if any streaming service was much better at the time?
They did a better job by offering an unsustainable variety of programming from all the studios in one place at the same time. All of the competitors at the time only offered financially viable services.
I believe in ai now because I looked at the Netflix balance sheet and thought. “There is NO WAY they could become profitable they are spending wayyy to much money and have way to much debt. It’s financially impossible to get out of this hole”
I understand how it worked and how it could not have. There are a lot of ways this could fail on AI but there are some real ways forward. AI has a similar application reach as the internet. It’s world changing.
I see why meta and google are going in hard. They lived though the rise and fall of blockbuster. They saw Sony release 3 different steaming services before after and during Netflix. This is the disruption for the current generation of tech and their revenue model.
Someone is going to ‘Win’ AI and a lot of others will loose.
One company may win, but we all will lose for sure. Specially investors, the math doesn't add up even if revenue breaks even.
It will be even more funny if these companies are declared financially bankrupt and the profitable parts are sold separately and the non profitable will stay with share holders.
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Market share of a negative profit market.
Yes. That was my reaction, too.
If I start giving away autographed headhsots, have I then also cornered an emerging market? lol.
Wait until the winner shows up and proceeds to absolutely wreck everything with fees and subscriptions jammed into everything remaining that didn't need AI.
Look up commoditizing the compliment.
So, people are falling for Anthropic's marketing scheme?
Personally, I find myself using the Chinese alternatives more and more as they are just way cheaper.
The good thing is that a deepseek can be run locally relatively well with consumer hardware. I trust chinese companies as much as i trust american companies with my data and my prompts.
You have 170+ GB VRAM at home? (:
I mainly use DeepSeek v4 Flash now, it's the cheapest around and the quality is high enough for coding. At work we're throwing tons of money at Claude, but even there I usually stick to Sonnet (as Opus is burning money).
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Theres a lot of good models free online that are open source/Chinese and the only cost is a bit of slowness on my rig. No token limit or whatever. Totally agree.
Its about as good as commercial products now...
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The company taking most of chatGPT's market share is actually Gemini, which I think is cheating because it's basically just padding the numbers with random google searches.
Can't be Europeans as they're locked out from the new models LOL
As is everyone?
I switched to opencode and deepseek
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Who the fuck cares
That depends; it will most likely cause some pretty serious issues outside the AI space. When that bubble finally pops, it'll probably make the dot-com bust look like a bathtub fart. Knock-on effects over non AI industries, and a lot of little bitch CEO's that put all their money/companies money in AI will now be out a whole lot of cash and go on (more) firing sprees.
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Me. I care.
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AI is becoming a commodity. Companies with such high burn rates will have a hard time staying alive.
Especially with open weights models available from cloud AI providers.
Yeah the open weight models are getting good enough that a lot of people can just host their own for most tasks.
On what hardware? I have a 1yo laptop running Linux and it's slow AF on open source llms. Might be to do with video card drivers, but I'd be happy to hear suggestions on which machine to put next to my raspberry pi for a local LLM.
You don't really want to be running them on a laptop. You either need a big dedicate graphics card (with 16 GB of RAM preferably) or a unified RAM/VRAM machine like a mac mini or a strix halo.
Local model running is definitely more doable now that it was a year ago but its not yet at the level of throw it on anything and it'll work fine.
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not a gambling man but if i was... https://polymarket.com/event/sam-altman-in-jail-by
This is my first time actually navigating to one of these websites. God damn it's so much more dystopian than I even imagined.
Hehe my experience was distopian alright, the page won't load
For those who didn’t read past the headline: OpenAI is still growing, but competition is growing faster.
I wish headlines would start to qualify market share. They had over 50% of the active usera/subscribers/acticity or something like that. The addressable market on the other hand isna lot more people and they probably never got anywhere close to 50% of that.
The free market strikes again.
Mistral or Lumo way to go
I don't know what models power Lumo, but Mistral is so far behind the competition it's not even funny.
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