alt Hacker NewsQuite right, honestly not sure how I fucked that up so bad but I'll own it. Okay so all we need is every coder + 0.6 million more or so in the United States, subscribed to this for 8 hours a day, and the business model can work.
That still feels incredibly optimistic given how split the community at large seems to be about how good this tech is, and it assumes all those developers also all work for firms large enough to pay for all of that.
However we are still very much in back of napkin math. We haven't even gone into what it costs to provide these services, how much it's going to cost yet for all these datacenters to be built, how much electricity and water they're going to rip through, their own employees and basic overhead, and all the rest. So IMO, we've now elevated it from "hopeless" to "this could work if a whole lot of other things line up really well."
It's not just developers who are using this. My economist friends are. I bet most business analysts and general administration folks are or will be soon. Every normal person I know in my neighborhood is using AI for this thing or that. 50M people are currently subscribed to ChatGPT and it would be very surprising if this number goes down in the future.
I dunno I think about the language some people are using about AI investment and it is reminiscent of the many years where people were saying Amazon was a bad buy because they never turned a profit. Admittedly AI companies are investing more than the money they've already brought in, but I would be very hesitant to predict that it's all froth given the usefulness I've gleaned from the tools.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not unconcerned, but I think there are good reasons to suspect that at least some of the AI companies are making sound investments.