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"LLMs can do anything" except make positive cashflow.
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abbadon420 sh.itjust.works abbadon420@sh.itjust.works
Joined: 2025-06-28
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forbiddencherry lemmy.today forbiddencherry@lemmy.today
Joined: 2026-06-04
#2 · (edited) Quote Reply

I'm one of the seeming few who paid to register it back in the Win9x days. Turned out that the key also works for the non-free Linux version (think I only ever bothered to set that up once). These days gzipped tarballs or squashfs with zstd are my go-tos. The former for speed with source trees or such, and the latter for filesystem backups or larger directories, because loop mounting it is so fast and convenient.

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kurt_vonnegut2 lemmy.dbzer0.com kurt_vonnegut2@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Joined: 2026-09-18
#3 · (edited) Quote Reply

So you're saying we should be pumping all our savings and pension money in WinRar?

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whaleross lemmy.world whaleross@lemmy.world
Joined: 2023-07-02
#4 · Quote Reply

And a more reliable product that returns the expected results every time.

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MolochHorridus piefed.social MolochHorridus@piefed.social
Joined: 2026-02-09
#5 · Quote Reply

So you're saying we should be pumping all our savings and pension money in WinRar?

It has more potential.

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SpruceBringsteen lemmy.world SpruceBringsteen@lemmy.world
Joined: 2023-07-03
#6 · Quote Reply

I'm one of the seeming few who paid to register it back in the Win9x days. Turned out that the key also works for the non-free Linux version (think I only ever bothered to set that up once). These days gzipped tarballs or squashfs with zstd are my go-tos. The former for speed with source trees or such, and the latter for filesystem backups or larger directories, because loop mounting it is so f...

These days gzipped tarballs or squashfs with zstd are my go-tos.

What the fuck did you just call me?

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yermaw sh.itjust.works yermaw@sh.itjust.works
Joined: 2025-07-10
#7 · Quote Reply

It has more potential.

If they can get their sales into double digits, the sky's the limit!

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TARgz lemmy.world TARgz@lemmy.world
Joined: 2023-07-22
#8 · Quote Reply

These days gzipped tarballs or squashfs with zstd are my go-tos. What the fuck did you just call me?

git gud

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greygore lemmy.world greygore@lemmy.world
Joined: 2024-10-20
#9 · Quote Reply

Actually, I’m pretty sure WeWork was more profitable than OpenAI, both in absolute dollars and percentage.

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zarkanian sh.itjust.works zarkanian@sh.itjust.works
Joined: 2024-01-11
#10 · Quote Reply

I was finally starting to save up money in a 401k for retirement. Then I got fired. Now the AI bubble is going to burst and nuke what little money is in my 401k. FML.

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Rothe piefed.social Rothe@piefed.social
Joined: 2025-08-25
#11 · Quote Reply

Your local grocery store is more profitable than OpenAI. In fact you are more profitable than OpenAI.

OpenAI owes hundreds of billions of dollars, with a revenue a fraction of that. They will never become profitable.

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jaybone lemmy.zip jaybone@lemmy.zip
Joined: 2025-02-08
#12 · Quote Reply

I was finally starting to save up money in a 401k for retirement. Then I got fired. Now the AI bubble is going to burst and nuke what little money is in my 401k. FML.

I’m trying to stick with it, and not pull a bunch of money out. If this is all just insider trading back and forth, my hope is it will recover over time and level out. (As that will be in the interest of the manipulators too.)

If it’s just a big crash, like 1929 style, then I figure we’re all fucked whether you have stocks or dollar bills or CDs or doubloons.

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cRazi_man europe.pub cRazi_man@europe.pub
Joined: 2025-06-04
#13 · Quote Reply

Your local grocery store is more profitable than OpenAI. In fact you are more profitable than OpenAI. OpenAI owes hundreds of billions of dollars, with a revenue a fraction of that. They will never become profitable.

you are more profitable than OpenAI

I've got mortgage debt though.

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jaybone lemmy.zip jaybone@lemmy.zip
Joined: 2025-02-08
#14 · Quote Reply

git gud

your mom gave me zstd in my tarballs

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lIlIlIlIlIlIl lemmy.world lIlIlIlIlIlIl@lemmy.world
Joined: 2025-03-31
#15 · Quote Reply

I was finally starting to save up money in a 401k for retirement. Then I got fired. Now the AI bubble is going to burst and nuke what little money is in my 401k. FML.

Some of the big S&P500 ETFs (like VOO) have shockingly little exposure to AI relative to the rest of the market

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bad1080 piefed.social bad1080@piefed.social
Joined: 2026-02-27
#16 · Quote Reply

at this point a granny selling eggs is more profitable

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abbadon420 sh.itjust.works abbadon420@sh.itjust.works
Joined: 2025-06-28
#17 · Quote Reply

Your local grocery store is more profitable than OpenAI. In fact you are more profitable than OpenAI. OpenAI owes hundreds of billions of dollars, with a revenue a fraction of that. They will never become profitable.

The Weimar Republic was more profitable... well no, maybe not. But you get the sentiment.

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Jaysyn lemmy.world Jaysyn@lemmy.world
Joined: 2025-04-09
#18 · Quote Reply

I wonder what will happen in 2027 when those repayments come due.

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makeshift0546 lemmy.today makeshift0546@lemmy.today
Joined: 2026-05-11
#19 · Quote Reply

They could if investors were happy with good enough and didn’t need to release a mediocre update every 8 weeks. Plenty of folks would be happy with opus 4.8 for the next few years and a $20 a month sub.

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straussbelial lemmy.world straussbelial@lemmy.world
Joined: 2026-06-14
#20 · Quote Reply

Your local grocery store is more profitable than OpenAI. In fact you are more profitable than OpenAI. OpenAI owes hundreds of billions of dollars, with a revenue a fraction of that. They will never become profitable.

Revenue? ಠ_ಠ

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forbiddencherry lemmy.today forbiddencherry@lemmy.today
Joined: 2026-06-04
#21 · Quote Reply

your mom gave me zstd in my tarballs

And Jia Tan xz'd in your back door?

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optional sh.itjust.works brotundspiele@sh.itjust.works
Joined: 2024-04-08
#22 · Quote Reply

The Weimar Republic was more profitable... well no, maybe not. But you get the sentiment.

They made trillions of marks, so yes they were extremely profitable.

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prole lemmy.blahaj.zone prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
Joined: 2024-06-11
#23 · (edited) Quote Reply

They made trillions of marks, so yes they were extremely profitable.

I like that they never lost their gusto with the designs of the bills lol

Like they had to know that their currency was basically dead, yet they still made sure that those 100 billion Mark notes looked classy as fuck.

If/when the modern US makes it to this point, I can't imagine them putting all that much effort into making our $100 billion dollar bills look cool.

They'll probably have fucking Steve Bannon's face on them.

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naught101 lemmy.world naught101@lemmy.world
Joined: 2024-05-08
#24 · Quote Reply

I like that they never lost their gusto with the designs of the bills lol Like they had to know that their currency was basically dead, yet they still made sure that those 100 billion Mark notes looked classy as fuck. If/when the modern US makes it to this point, I can't imagine them putting all that much effort into making our $100 billion dollar bills look cool. They'll probably have fucking ...

The person designing them had to make them pretty because they knew they were going to be paid in them

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naught101 lemmy.world naught101@lemmy.world
Joined: 2024-05-08
#25 · Quote Reply

Some of the big S&P500 ETFs (like VOO) have shockingly little exposure to AI relative to the rest of the market

Source? Interested

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just_an_average_joe lemmy.dbzer0.com just_an_average_joe@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Joined: 2024-08-02
#26 · Quote Reply

They could if investors were happy with good enough and didn’t need to release a mediocre update every 8 weeks. Plenty of folks would be happy with opus 4.8 for the next few years and a $20 a month sub.

You seem to misunderstand "opus 4.8 and $20 a month" IS the reason why they are unprofitable.

They already got the data and GPUs and lots of researchers doing research. In fact, since gpt-4o they have been trying to make these models smaller and more profitable.

But at the present moment, they just can't beat chinese models on efficiency cuz that's what those companies were focusing on from the begining due to gpu export law US put.

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ProfessorPeregrine reddthat.com ProfessorPeregrine@reddthat.com
Joined: 2023-08-03
#27 · Quote Reply

you are more profitable than OpenAI I've got mortgage debt though.

Waaaaaay less than OpwnAI though

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MalReynolds slrpnk.net MalReynolds@slrpnk.net
Joined: 2023-06-25
#28 · Quote Reply

I’m trying to stick with it, and not pull a bunch of money out. If this is all just insider trading back and forth, my hope is it will recover over time and level out. (As that will be in the interest of the manipulators too.) If it’s just a big crash, like 1929 style, then I figure we’re all fucked whether you have stocks or dollar bills or CDs or doubloons.

As that will be in the interest of the manipulators too.

Nope, crashes are when they buy the poors assets at cents on the dollar.

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explodicle sh.itjust.works explodicle@sh.itjust.works
Joined: 2024-04-11
#29 · Quote Reply

you are more profitable than OpenAI I've got mortgage debt though.

See, you'd think people would do more research when lending billions for LLMs than when lending a dollar for a cardboard box.

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explodicle sh.itjust.works explodicle@sh.itjust.works
Joined: 2024-04-11
#30 · Quote Reply

I was finally starting to save up money in a 401k for retirement. Then I got fired. Now the AI bubble is going to burst and nuke what little money is in my 401k. FML.

You should roll over your 401K to investments you believe in.

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UnderpantsWeevil lemmy.world UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
Joined: 2023-06-14
#31 · Quote Reply

“I remember once my father and I were walking down Fifth Avenue and there was a homeless person sitting right outside of Trump Tower and I remember my father pointing to him and saying, ‘You know, that guy has $8 billion more than me,’ because he was in such extreme debt at that point, you know?”

~ Ivanka Trump

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UnderpantsWeevil lemmy.world UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
Joined: 2023-06-14
#32 · (edited) Quote Reply

Your local grocery store is more profitable than OpenAI. In fact you are more profitable than OpenAI. OpenAI owes hundreds of billions of dollars, with a revenue a fraction of that. They will never become profitable.

They will never become profitable.

If you look at OpenAI as a single, independent, private company then they appear unprofitable. But when you look at them as a means of laundering Pentagon money and other federal contracts into straw purchases for NVIDIA and Oracle, they are immensely profitable.

AI is a Loss Leader. It props up the production and sale of hardware, which has been fruitful for its partners, its investors, and the economy as a whole. It is a digital form of induced demand in so far as new construction creates a "virtuous" cycle of increasing consumption, as more and more of the business and public sector is dragged into its orbit.

The end-game for OpenAI is to have a captured market of businesses and government institutions. Whole sectors of the economy devoid of human knowledge workers who are hopelessly addicted to AI Agent processes, because nobody managing the companies actually know what these agents are doing anymore. At this point, Altman and Amodei can charge whatever they damned well please for token traffic, because there's no bureaucracy capable of competing with them.

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katze lemmy.4d2.org katze@lemmy.4d2.org
Joined: 2026-04-16
#33 · Quote Reply

I'm one of the seeming few who paid to register it back in the Win9x days. Turned out that the key also works for the non-free Linux version (think I only ever bothered to set that up once). These days gzipped tarballs or squashfs with zstd are my go-tos. The former for speed with source trees or such, and the latter for filesystem backups or larger directories, because loop mounting it is so f...

The former for speed with source trees or such

xz -0 is faster than gzip and has a higher compression ratio.

1
UnderpantsWeevil lemmy.world UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
Joined: 2023-06-14
#34 · (edited) Quote Reply

The Weimar Republic was more profitable... well no, maybe not. But you get the sentiment.

I mean, you joke. But Germany pivoted out of the Great Depression far faster than its European peers precisely because they weren't afraid to print a bunch of money and pay people to do things.

The Fascists inherited one of the only recovering economies in Europe by the time they took power in 1932. And when they assumed office, they brought investment from the Americans overseas (who were having their own fascist turn), because they were willing to purge or enslave local populations, tear down neighborhoods, and build up whatever capital Standard Oil, IBM, and Ford Motor Company asked of them.

On the opposite side of the Atlantic and on the other side of the Urals, progressive liberals and Soviet communists were trying out a leftist mirror of this strategy. They were using the levers of the state to mobilize the masses of unemployed labor into productive capital improvements for the benefit of the public at-large. So the US, Germany, Japan, and the USSR all rapidly emerged out of the '29 crash into a booming 1930s economy. Meanwhile, England and France and much of Latin America and North Africa languished under artificial constraints of state-capitalism.

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ayyy sh.itjust.works ayyy@sh.itjust.works
Joined: 2024-06-20
#35 · Quote Reply

They will never become profitable. If you look at OpenAI as a single, independent, private company then they appear unprofitable. But when you look at them as a means of laundering Pentagon money and other federal contracts into straw purchases for NVIDIA and Oracle, they are immensely profitable. AI is a Loss Leader. It props up the production and sale of hardware, which has been fruitful for ...

This would make sense if they were the only game in town , but they very much…aren’t.

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stoy lemmy.zip stoy@lemmy.zip
Joined: 2023-10-17
#36 · Quote Reply

“I remember once my father and I were walking down Fifth Avenue and there was a homeless person sitting right outside of Trump Tower and I remember my father pointing to him and saying, ‘You know, that guy has $8 billion more than me,’ because he was in such extreme debt at that point, you know?” ~ Ivanka Trump

I refuse to believe that Trump is capable of such introspection.

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lIlIlIlIlIlIl lemmy.world lIlIlIlIlIlIl@lemmy.world
Joined: 2025-03-31
#37 · (edited) Quote Reply

Source? Interested

https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=472817

Also somewhat relevant: https://beatthecouch.com/

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bstix feddit.dk bstix@feddit.dk
Joined: 2023-06-09
#38 · (edited) Quote Reply

If AI could really make your business so much more efficient that it makes up for the cost of paying for AI... Why doesn't Google just run your business themselves? They could make even more money than you do.

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stoy lemmy.zip stoy@lemmy.zip
Joined: 2023-10-17
#39 · Quote Reply

The former for speed with source trees or such xz -0 is faster than gzip and has a higher compression ratio.

That can't be right, all reports I have read about comparing xz with gzip tells me that xz will have better compression but at a slower speed than gzip.

Have you run a test of gzip at the same compression level with the same data?

I don't doubt that xz will be smaller, I doubt it will be quicker.

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chiliedogg lemmy.world chiliedogg@lemmy.world
Joined: 2023-06-26
#40 · Quote Reply

You seem to misunderstand "opus 4.8 and $20 a month" IS the reason why they are unprofitable. They already got the data and GPUs and lots of researchers doing research. In fact, since gpt-4o they have been trying to make these models smaller and more profitable. But at the present moment, they just can't beat chinese models on efficiency cuz that's what those companies were focusing on from the...

The Chinese models were also developed later and allegedly didn't have to focus so hard on the initial acquisition of training data, so were able to build their models completely differently.

Think of it like developing dictionary technology. For the first dictionary, the hardest part is finding all the words that need to be defined. After that it's just a matter of adding new words occasionally as they're found.

That's the "theft" the Western AI companies accused the Chinese companies of doing. By starting with the initial training data from Western devs, the Chinese AIs (allegedly) skipped over the hard part, which means they are able to focus more of their processing on the end product.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing, depending on your perspective (ignoring all the ethical questions around AI data acquisition). Duplicating work someone else has already done is wasteful.

But it's also disingenuous to say that the guy who takes an existing dictionary and changes all the definitions did a "better job" than the guy who wrote the first one, even if the end product is, in fact, better.

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raven55six lemmy.world raven55six@lemmy.world
Joined: 2025-08-01
#41 · Quote Reply

That is so true, bringing $40 Billion a year with about $80 Billion as expenses makes OpenAI indeed in a red zone. They should consider shutting down so that we can have some level of relief from AI slop.

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UnderpantsWeevil lemmy.world UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
Joined: 2023-06-14
#42 · Quote Reply

This would make sense if they were the only game in town , but they very much…aren’t.

Keeping foreign technology out of the reach of US consumers has been a big part of Trump/Biden/Trump-Era tech policy.

And as hardware prices skyrocket, access to compute approaches a monopoly position.

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UnderpantsWeevil lemmy.world UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
Joined: 2023-06-14
#43 · Quote Reply

I refuse to believe that Trump is capable of such introspection.

Believe it or not, Trump's become dumber with age.

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a_non_monotonic_function lemmy.world a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world
Joined: 2025-10-22
#44 · Quote Reply

If they can get their sales into double digits, the sky's the limit!

Those numbers may actually kill the CEO.

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JcbAzPx lemmy.world JcbAzPx@lemmy.world
Joined: 2023-07-06
#45 · Quote Reply

They will never become profitable. If you look at OpenAI as a single, independent, private company then they appear unprofitable. But when you look at them as a means of laundering Pentagon money and other federal contracts into straw purchases for NVIDIA and Oracle, they are immensely profitable. AI is a Loss Leader. It props up the production and sale of hardware, which has been fruitful for ...

Most of the money getting funneled to Nvidia came from them in the first place. That's why they're one of the chatbot's biggest cheerleaders.

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BradleyUffner lemmy.world BradleyUffner@lemmy.world
Joined: 2023-06-11
#46 · Quote Reply

I wonder what will happen in 2027 when those repayments come due.

They'll pay off the old loans with new loans disguised as investments between all the major AI players.

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whotookkarl lemmy.dbzer0.com whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Joined: 2025-07-12
#47 · Quote Reply

They'll reclassify it as a necessary utility like water or power and tax more subsidies for paying billionaires even more from public coffers before admitting it's mostly just search engines & corporate social media eating their own tail.

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whotookkarl lemmy.dbzer0.com whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Joined: 2025-07-12
#48 · (edited) Quote Reply

I wonder what will happen in 2027 when those repayments come due.

The government will buy a stake to both pay billionaires more from collected taxes and control what information can be generated and making the spy apparatus backdoors tracking every question or command part of the official platforms.

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chrisashtear lemmy.zip chrisashtear@lemmy.zip
Joined: 2026-08-14
#49 · Quote Reply

If AI could really make your business so much more efficient that it makes up for the cost of paying for AI... Why doesn't Google just run your business themselves? They could make even more money than you do.

Theyd probably try to use gemini, and it would either spin in circles or delete their production databases

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UnderpantsWeevil lemmy.world UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
Joined: 2023-06-14
#50 · Quote Reply

Most of the money getting funneled to Nvidia came from them in the first place. That's why they're one of the chatbot's biggest cheerleaders.

Most of the money getting funneled to Nvidia came from them in the first place.

NVIDIA's not getting most of its money from OpenAI. OpenAI doesn't really buy anything from NVIDIA. They buy rack space from Oracle, which then builds out new datacenters with NVIDIA chipsets. And Oracle's primary revenue stream is from its business Cloud Services, of which OpenAI is a small fraction.

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m532 lemmy.ml m532@lemmy.ml
Joined: 2021-06-05
#51 · Quote Reply

Capitalists: Noo its bad, see, it doesn't make profit

Communists: Free AI for everyone

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