alt Hacker NewsI know that people keep saying "we're early on here", but I take it as a negative signal that people keep thinking we are in the early innings here. Compared to previous generations of technology change, a great deal of time has passed, it should be a bit disconcerting that no one seems to have found a way to make money out of this yet.
Look at previous killer apps- they came out quickly and were raking in money very quickly. The Apple II went on sale on June 10th, 1977. Visicalc went on sale October 17th, 1979- 860 days separate the two. Apple IPO'd in 1980 with a 21% operating margin! Netscape Navigator 1.0 released December 15th 1994, Amazon.com made its first sale July 16th 1995- 214 days later. AMZN IPO'd May 15th 1997, 883 days after Netscape 1.0 released to the public (they had raised <10 million dollars to that point, but chose not to have a profit because they kept re-investing all of their profit into expanding the business).
We are already 1232 days since ChatGPT 1.0. So we're about 50% farther along than either of those killer apps. No one has figured out as good a business model for Generative AI as either of those were.
To use the other great technology transformation of the past 50 years, cell phones, I have a bit of trouble figuring out the right comparison to ChatGPT 1.0. I can work backwards from today to ChatGPT 1.0 opening up to the public, that's about the difference from the iPhone 3G (the first one with an appstore, the real killer app) to the launch of the Motorola Razr, to give you an idea of how fast mobile technology moved.
Do note that the Razr and the iPhone, like Visicalc, the Apple II, and Netscape 1.0 were hugely profitable for their companies, in a way that no one has demonstrated with Generative AI. Amazon is a bit of a special case, but they were not raising money, they were just re-investing cash that was being thrown off not as profits but into expanding the business. I don't believe that any AI company is generating cashflow the way that Amazon was in 1997, and the other companies mentioned here were GAAP-profitable.
Replies
"previous killer apps" - exactly. That's the point. Everyone is anchored in AI as being the next desktop app. It's not.
We're only using 1% of what these models will ultimately do when they're running 24/7 as utilities serving new economic models.
There just isn't enough compute right now to realize the larger monetization strategies.
Most people don’t want to accept and believe that the only viable revenue stream is selling tokens in relation to software development.
All the other stuff is nice… but you will continue to be money losing and eventually die.
Now you can’t come out and say this because there’s a whole bunch of investments that depend on hype - think about the robotics nonsense.
I think that fact that IPOs have grown slower over the years is more about larger VC markets where they can fund valuations up to hundreds of billions rather than something to do with adoption.
As you note, Netscape and Amazon IPOed fairly quickly.
Google took 6 years (1998 to 2004)
Facebook took 8 years (2004 to 2012)
Alibaba Group took 15 years (1999 to 2014)
Claude Code is at $30B annual recurring revenue, and it launched in Feb 2025, and OpenAI at $25B (although they measure partner revenue differently). By comparison the iPhone make $630M revenue in the 12 months after it was launched.
Comparing the IPO market today to the IPO market in the late 90s is not very instructive. You could have IPO'd a lemonade stand in 1998 and raised $10 million.