[dmbche]

So what happens if the AI companies can't make money? I see more and more advances and breakthrough but they are taking in debt and no revenue in sight.

I seem to understand debt is very bad here since they could just sell more shares, but aren't (either valuation is stretched or no buyers).

Just a recession? Something else? Aren't they very very big to fall?

Edit0: Revenue isn't the right word, profit is more correct. Amazon not being profitable fucks with my understanding of buisness. Not an economist.

[sigmar]

>taking in debt and no revenue in sight.

which companies don't have revenue? anthropic is at a run rate of 14 billion (up from 9B in December, which was up from 4B in July). Did you mean profit? They expect to be cash flow positive in 2028.

[dmbche]

Yes thank you, mixing my brushes here - I remembered one of the companies having raised over 100b and having about 10b in revenue.

[echelon]

AI will kill SaaS moats and thus revenue. Anyone can build new SaaS quickly. Lots of competition will lead to marginal profits.

AI will kill advertising. Whatever sits at the top "pane of glass" will be able to filter ads out. Personal agents and bots will filter ads out.

AI will kill social media. The internet will fill with spam.

AI models will become commodity. Unless singularity, no frontier model will stay in the lead. There's competition from all angles. They're easy to build, just capital intensive (though this is only because of speed).

All this leaves is infrastructure.

[ddxv]

Not following some of the jumps here.

Advertising, how will they kill ads any better than the current cat and mouse games with ad blockers?

Social Media, how will they kill social media? Probably 80% of the LinkedIn posts are touched by AI (lots of people spend time crafting them, so even if AI doesn't write the whole thing you know they ran the long ones through one) but I'm still reading (ok maybe skimming) the posts.

[dboreham]

> AI will kill SaaS moats and thus revenue. Anyone can build new SaaS quickly.

I'm LLM-positive but for me this is a stretch. Seeing it pop up all over media in the past couple weeks also makes me suspect astrofurfing. Like a few years back when there were a zillion articles saying voice search was the future and nobody used regular web search any more.

[ryan_lane]

AI models will simply build the ads into the responses, seamlessly. How do you filter out ads when you search for suggestions for products, and the AI companies suggest paid products in the responses?

Based on current laws, does this even have to be disclosed? Will laws be passed to require disclosure?

[casey2]

What happens if oil companies can't make money? They will restructure society so they can. That's the essence of capitalism, the willingness to restructure society to chase growth.

Obviously this tech is profitable in some world. Car companies can't make money if we live in walking distance and people walk on roads.

[ipnon]

They're using the ride share app playbook. Subsidize the product to reach market saturation. Once you've found a market segment that depends on your product you raise the price to break even. One major difference though is that ride share's haven't really changed in capabilities since they launched: it's a map that shows a little car with your driver coming and a pin where you're going. But it's reasonable to believe that AI will have new fundamental capabilities in the 2030s, 2040s, and so on.