[dangus]

It’s weird to me that profitability is so thoroughly dismissed by the software tech industry because of an assumption that the tech industry will always be “early stage” and “high growth.”

We can look at a “success story” like Uber and it is still net negative over its entire existence. This is a business that’s in a literal monopoly/duopoly status in most markets it operates in with vastly reduced regulatory burden compared to the industry disrupted. Literally the ideal scenario for printing money and yet it hasn’t made any. It’s the poster child for the unicorn exit that founders dream of.

The end result is that Uber and companies like it are a financial instruments that transfer dollars away from one set of investors to another set of investors.

If Uber hasn’t yet made its investment back, I struggle to wonder how some of these AI ventures will ever make that money back when their expenditures make Uber look like a small little side project.

Meta has spent almost 4 years worth of its net income for FY2025 on AI going by this website’s data, and counting.

We are decades since Web 2.0 took off, almost 20 years since the iPhone launched, 50 years of Apple Computer. Software isn’t some new industry anymore. There isn’t an industry left that hasn’t completed its digital transformation. These spray and pray economies would have died off years ago if it wasn’t for the fact that software companies have uniquely low cost structures where they don’t need to build factories or distribution networks to get their products to their customers. These low cost structures might just be concealing the fact that it’s not going to be a growth industry forever.

[48terry]

And also: AI is basically the only thing anyone is talking about. Yeah, Uber existed and it's known about and was advertised and such. It has not overwhelmed every topic ever like the current LLM mandate has been. People are getting sit down and told they MUST engage with this stuff.

How has the sheer saturation of LLMs not resulted in profit? It has dominated the conversation, center stage, of every news outlet for like 4 years now. It is the most known-about thing currently out there.

And we haven't been able to convert that much captured attention into profitability yet? That seems... bad?

[dangus]

Right! I think the only example that comes to mind for me as far as “bled money for years and eventually became a cash cow” is YouTube. Most other ventures that bled money that long ended up dying.

Maybe Reddit is an example? But my impression is that they ran a modest operation before going public.

ChatGPT is the 5th most visited website in the world. Gemini.Google.com is ranked above amazon.com. Where is the profit?

[bix6]

But why would you make it profitable now? We are still in the early innings and its growth at all costs. Growing from sustainable cash flow isn’t fast enough for investors, they want HYPERGROWTH (now with RAWBERRY)