> That said, even if a developer is burning $50/hr, many, many employees at large companies cost more than $100k/yr to employ all costs considered, so making them say 20-30% more productive can easily make that worth it for most. If the labs shave their margins ultimately to more like 20-30%, you'd have ~$15/hr in costs to use the services, and nearly every white collar job is way over 30k/yr to employ. If your salary is 80k, you probably cost the company 200k all in, so making you 15% more productive offsets the $15/hr cost.

Nobody including the connected article is making the argument that this cannot be profitable ever. People are saying "there is no way this admittedly quite interesting tool is going to be able to make back all of this money" and I think they are completely right to say that.

You can absolutely make money with this stuff, just not at this scale. The buildout for this shit has been certifiably crazy and a number of the involved firms are overleveraged for tens and even hundreds of billions of dollars.

How in the sweet fuck are you paying that off, plus giving investors dividends, selling this at $15/hour/user??? That math does not math. A quick google says there are between 1.5 and 4.4 million developers in the US alone, let's say it's 5 million, to be generous, and each of them is subbed to this for 8 hours per day, continuously. That's 600 million per year in revenue. If you took ALL that revenue, and put it towards paying down this debt, not leaving any for employee salaries, upkeep, ongoing development, it would take DECADES to pay down what OpenAI already owes.

And yes I'm sticking directly to code, because that's the only thing I've seen it be really good at. Are we really proposing that every knowledge worker on earth and every manager of such workers is going to have an autonomous agent running all the time!? To do what, make sure they don't have to read or write email? Which even just that example is bringing in a fucking mess of legal, compliance, and security violations because LLMs are not intelligent and are not capable of being properly secured.

Like I'm sorry, I cannot take this industry seriously when even the most basic back-of-napkin math is saying, nay, screaming from the rooftops that they are FUCKED.