alt Hacker NewsHow did Uber somewhat break even? They lost $34b before making a profit.
Uber was only on a path to monopoly in the US, not world wide. It’s lost to local competitors in most countries. And it can get disrupted by self driving cars soon.
OpenAI’s SOTA LLM training smells like a natural monopoly or duopoly to me. The cost to train the smartest models keep increasing. Most competitors will bow out as they do not have the revenue to keep competing. You can already see this with a few labs looking for a niche instead of competing head on with Anthropic and OpenAI.
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vlovich123 • yesterday at 10:28 PM
The cost of copying SOTA models though is super cheap and doesn’t take super long.
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> How did Uber somewhat break even? They lost $34b before making a profit.
It took them ~14 years to lose that $34 billion. Some projections suggest that OpenAI has lost a third of that in a single quarter. Even the most optimistic projections indicate that they're losing that much every 2-3 years. There's talk that they might lose ~$150B before profitability.
These are just numbers on a page to regular people, but $34 billion and $150 billion are very different numbers.