[motbus3]

I know people say it is unprofitable but I wonder if there is a way to verify it is truly is. I will not say any details but I worked for a giant company which was barely making money YoY but somehow the bonuses for heads were bigger and bigger given a proxy metric related to profit.

There are way too many ways companies arrange to pay themselves and never be profitable to avoid taxes.

[bombcar]

"Profitable" is the wrong metric, really, it's whether it is sustainable - can development continue indefinitely given the current financial situation?

[motbus3]

I'm thinking about your comment... It put many wheels to spin...

Tldr; I think the don't care about what will happen to the company in medium or long term.

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Are any of those companies looking for stability or sustainability?

I have the impression they are completely aware of the diminished return effects and they will explore the moment to the fullest of their capabilities promising even more absurd things when the results are even smaller.

I do agree there is a considerable improvement comparing from a year ago but definitely not ground shaking as it was from the year before to the last.

Many of the promises turns out to be empty or at least having huge number of asterisks to it.

I think there are flags everywhere. From minor things such as everyone using different benchmarks or plotting performance differences on weird choices os axis and ordering.

Other mild things such as promoting the "system" created a compiler from scratch when such compiler does not even do a hello world and runs and gave output binaries running 300x then the counterparts.

(I am aware there was a misusage of the agentic benchmark to build a compiler but there was an active choice on how to tell the story. Given other movements I am not quite sure if I believe it was an accident)

There are other red flags such as people rolling back to previous versions of models because they can't get the new one to work properly.

Other situations such as the affirmations that they have such "dangerous" model that apparently seems to be more of a benchmark trick than real results with <100B models being able to replicate the benchmark results only by changing the methodology.

I don't think we are yet in the turning point where everything will collapse but my feeling is that we are going in that direction unless something that makes these models much more intelligent AND efficient.

It makes sense to not hire a person when you can have a machine for the same job for the same price. But AI prices are getting higher than the returns do the margins for it to be a sensible choice are getting smaller.

That all said, I say again that I think that they are completely aware of this effect. Not because they understand the technology but because this happens more frequently than not. Because of this, I don't think they care to be sustainable. All of them,smell that they will take the money and leave the ship to sink.

[bombcar]

I think there's also an idea that sustainability requires constant maintenance and improvement; but TeX is sustainable and it's approaching a limit function - it (plain TeX) gets no new features, but has very few remaining bugs.