[zachthewf]

I mean, inference costs have decreased like 1000x in a few years. OpenAI is the fastest growing startup by revenue, ever.

How foolish do you have be to be worrying about ROI right now? The companies that are building out the datacenters produce billions per year in free cash flow. Maybe OP would prefer a dividend?

[ben_w]

Given how close the tech is to running on consumer hardware — by which I mean normal consumers not top-end MacBooks — there's a real chance that the direct ROI is going to be exactly zero within 5 years.

I say direct, because Chrome is free to users, yet clearly has a benefit to Google worth spending on both development and advertising the browser to users, and analogous profit sources may be coming to LLMs for similar reasons — you can use it locally so long as you don't mind every third paragraph being a political message sponsored by the Turquoise Party of Tumbrige Wells.

[billyhoffman]

> OpenAI is the fastest growing startup by revenue, ever.

No it's not. Facebook hit $2B in Revenue in late 2010 - early 2011, ~5 years after its founding.

https://dazeinfo.com/2018/11/14/facebook-revenue-and-net-inc...

[kulahan]

Finding one example of him being wrong still kinda supports his point, don't you think?

[achierius]

No, it makes me think there are more. ", ever." Suggests you actually know the space of things you're talking about.

[dghlsakjg]

Especially when that example is Facebook!

[saalweachter]

MySpace had $1.5B in sales in 2009.

[dghlsakjg]

Facebook sold 2b of ads this week.

[shawabawa3]

Coinbase was founded in 2013 and hit $1B in revenue in 2019 iirc

[__loam]

I would definitely be worried about ROI if my main product was something my big tech competition could copy easily because they did the research that led to my product.