[ericb]

> the tech is real and has great promise.

This was very true of the dotcom bubble. The entire "web" was new, and the promise was everything you use it for today.

Pets.com was a laughing stock for years as an example of dotcom excess, and now we have chewy.com, successfully running the same model.

Webvan.com, was a similar example of "excess" and now we have Instacart and others.

I looked up webvan just now--the postmortem seems relevant:

"Webvan failed due to a combination of overspending on infrastructure, rapid and unproven expansion, and an unsustainable business model that prioritized growth over profitability."

[spectralista]

This to me is the whole bubble.

The problem of dotcom is we needed a cultural shift. I had my first internet date during the dot com bubble and I remember we would lie to people about how we met because the idea sounded so insane at the time to basically everyone. In 1999 it seemed kind of crazy to even use your real name online let alone put your credit card into the web browser.

Put your credit card into the internet browser then a stranger brings you items in their van? Completely insane culturally in 1999. It would have sounded like the start of an Unsolved Mysteries episode to the average person in 1999. There was no market for that in 1999.

The lesson I take from dotcom is we had this massive bubble and burst over technology that already existed, worked flawlessly and largely just needed time for the culture to adapt to it.

The main difference this time is we are pricing in technology that doesn't actually exist.

I can't think of another bubble that was based on something that doesn't exist. The closest analogy I can think of is the railroad bubble but with the trains not actually existing outside of some vague theoretical idea that we don't actually know how to build. A bubble in laying down rail because of how big it will be when we figure out how to build the trains.

The only way you would get a bubble that stupid would be to have 50-100 years of art, stories and movies priming the entire population on the inevitability of the train.

[JauntTrooper]

Uber might be the wildest cultural shift of the last 25 years.

Nobody blinks twice nowadays at getting into a car with a total stranger.

[saxenaabhi]

Isn't openAI already profitable on inference?

I understand training is still costly, but it's not unimaginable for it to turn profitable as well if you think believe they'll generate trillions in value by eliminating millions of jobs.

[hnfong]

If you eliminate ONE job and let's say the job pays $100K, in theory at most $100K goes instead to AI revenue. In practice it's a lot less, nobody is going to move everything to AI if it's just a 10% saving.

So, to get a trillion in value, you'd have to eliminate many tens or even hundreds of millions of jobs.

[zerosizedweasle]

No, inference is actually pointing to them being economically unviable.

https://www.ft.com/content/fce77ba4-6231-4920-9e99-693a6c38e...

[hattmall]

>Isn't openAI already profitable on inference?

I don't believe this has been the case or claim at all. At best they have recognized some limited use cases in certain models where API tokens have generated a gross profit.

[Gigachad]

They won’t generate trillions because there are several companies all competing and will undercut each other to win users.

[NoGravitas]

> Isn't openAI already profitable on inference?

Probably not, but the numbers they've released are too opaque to tell.