• billwashere@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    Then it didn’t make 13 billion…… and it didn’t lose 21 billion.

    It lost 8 billion. That’s how math works.

    • percent@infosec.pub
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      6 days ago

      You’re not wrong, but neither is the title. That’s just how business accounting works. Ultimately, it’s still the same conclusion ($8 billion loss)

  • abc@suppo.fi
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    6 days ago

    That’s a weird way of saying that they had a net loss of $8 billion. Are you trying to imply that this is somehow extraordinary for a growth company? How do you figure that?

  • tatterdemalion@programming.dev
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    7 days ago

    What’s their op ex though? I feel like there must be a sizable portion of that which isn’t actually necessary to keep the service up.

    • megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      6 days ago

      So the the operating expense was greater than their revenue from operations by about 2, but it seems like they’re minimizing it by hiding the cost of some of the compute inside marketing and training costs. This is something that a few AI companies in China have been caught doing to make it seem like they’re doing better than they are. So they could be incinerating money at an even faster rate than they just admitted.

        • megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          6 days ago

          Yah, given that “training models” doesn’t stop when the model is finished and released. Like, a released model needs to be continuously tweaked to keep it up to date or to deal with problems that have occurred. Even if that’s not literally tokens used by customers, it is compute being used to provide service to customers.

          And that’s just assuming that they’re not just hiding some compute costs used to service customer demand inside the R&D budget. “Oh, you see, this pool of customers are being served with an experimental version, so any compute here is actually R&D, any API fees or subscription payments made by them of course get counted towards normal revenue.”

  • ironycanal@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    6 days ago

    A lot of people are gonna give openaishit over this, but the old cliché is true; gotta spend money to lose money.

    At a personal scale you can just light a few bills on fire, and you’re good. Maybe even gamble away a home or something if you’re filthy rich.

    But at this scale that just doesn’t work. Burning this amount of money takes infrastructure, trucks, roads, labor, and facilities. Otherwise the poor’s might take some of it.

    Can you imagine what those people would spend this kind of money on?

    • MintyAnt@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      You are not actually considering the scale of 20 billion dollars nor the jump in a single year. Those are bad things.

      The actual economics behind LLMs shows us they cannot become profitable ever, and this “invest more before becoming profitable” story does not fit in part because of that. Other companies who used that model had a way to become profitable.

    • frunch@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      Sometimes you have to spend more than you make but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea! You just have to continue spending and one day it’ll maybe start turning a profit. Maybe not, though! 🙂 I love AI

      • ScruffyDucky@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        See my response below and keep an open mind.

        Edit: And yes I am serious because this is how business has been done for a long time

      • ScruffyDucky@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        Neither. It was very nice of frunch@lemmy.world to make an effort and explain my comment in his response. Sometimes things might not be as simple as you think so please keep an open mind. Thank you

      • ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
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        7 days ago

        They’re being facetious but it’s actually what AI investors are thinking. AI can lose money until it’s the only AI company left then they can charge whatever they want.

        I had an AI engineer tell me that hallucinations are actually AI having original thoughts. Zzzzz

        • potustheplant@feddit.nl
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          7 days ago

          Wtf, these folk s are clinically insane. It’d be funny if they weren’t literally fucking over the entire world in the process.

  • HugeNerd@lemmy.ca
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    7 days ago

    Bah that’s baby numbers compared to what “private space” will accomplish!