alt Hacker NewsI'm not sure if this is comparable to the yellow pages vs the internet.
Google became profitable in 2001 whereas OpenAI et al are still operating at a huge loss. Even with ads it's not clear whether LLMs can be profitable unless they increase prices significantly.
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LanceJones • last Wednesday at 10:25 PM
OpenAI could be profitable (easily) if it stopped training new models. Whether they will make that choice or not, who knows.
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Google was not profitable until they rolled out ads, either.
The scope of use of AI assistants in people's lives are significantly higher than google search, imo. People use it in far more scenarios already than just information retrieval. That's why some are betting there's a chance it's more valuable than present-day google search.