> OAI/Anthropic are negative on the books mostly because of massive R&D expenses. This compares well to Amazon circa 1999, which was positive on COGS but negative overall due to massive buildout R&D costs.
Isn’t the difference that ai labs can’t stop the R&D spend? They have to continue training new models.
There's a bunch of arguments you could make there, varying from "yes, to stay ahead of the competition" to "yes, but it'll get a lot cheaper" to "no, things will plateau eventually". All those are datapoints that IMO this isn't a great analogue to the dotcom boom.