[oblio]

SpaceX financials are a mess outside of the actual SpaceX part. xAI is losing money hand over fist, other random bits in there are doing the same. The valuation makes no sense.

It's basically a money transfer from the average person to the poor richest person on the planet.

The true Great Filter is mental illness, apparently.

[XorNot]

Moreover their filings on the matter basically correctly weight their space launch business and then go "and xAI will obviously be worth a bajilion dollars more".

[Alex-Programs]

XAI is now printing revenue thanks to the Anthropic compute deal. Moreso than SpaceX itself.

[sportsracersss]

They're still deep in the hole because the DCs were built on debt.

The IPO will hand those heavy debt bags to the public.

[oblio]

A lot of people are "printing revenue" in the current LLM economy, including, Nvidia, Azure, AWS, etc, the people selling shovels.

We have 0 proof that selling shovels is a sustainable business strategy since none of the gold prospectors are bold enough to publish GAAP + audited financial numbers.

Right now we have lots of people spending lots of money at the lower layers and none of the end-game companies, the ones selling to actual customers, private or companies, publishing any quarterly or yearly numbers that show that the end-state of current LLMs is profitability.

Keep in mind that Nvidia, Azure, AWS can't really pivot to something else once they can't stop selling shovels. Nvidia goes back to being a $10bn company selling GPUs to gamers and Azure/AWS probably see their earnings drop by a quarter or more if the AI bubble pops. At least shovel sellers during the gold rushes could cash in and invest in land or cattle or something and have long term sustainability.

[philipallstar]

> xAI is losing money hand over fist

I wonder how much better Anthropic is doing.

[oblio]

Well, apparently Anthropic became "profitable" last month, because of some 1-time deal with xAI.

I wouldn't bet on either Anthropic or OpenAI being profitable, we'll find out soon enough what this house of cards has inside, as they both want to IPO.

Though with the current US administration, as proven by the SpaceX IPO, laws are mere recommendations.

[loandbehold]

Anthropic is paying xAI, not other way around.

[oblio]

> That’s $15 billion a year in compute costs, but reduced to an indeterminately-discounted level for the precise months that Anthropic is using to tell investors and the media that it has an operating profit. That operating profit is a result of accountancy rather than any improvements to its business model.

> While I wouldn’t say this is cooking the books, it’s definitely a shiatsu-grade massaging of the numbers. Anthropic has deliberately leaked a quarterly “profit” where it knows it can suppress its costs

https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropics-profitability-swindle...

It turns out, there are many ways to skin a financial cat.

[philipallstar]

> Though with the current US administration, as proven by the SpaceX IPO, laws are mere recommendations.

Are they breaking laws?

[oblio]

If you can write the laws, nothing is illegal. This argument isn't as strong as you think it is.

[philipallstar]

I'm asking a question, not making an argument.

[oblio]

> I'm asking a question, not making an argument.

Is it a loaded question? If you ask and I reply with a curt "no" and you vanish back into the ether without replying, what does that gain both of us as well as anyone that reads these comments later?

To your point, I'm both not a lawyer and based on what I've read/seen, no, they aren't breaking any laws. But what they're doing is overall very shady.

Fairly sure most of what banks did during the 2008 GFC wasn't illegal either, until we made it illegal. Robbing banks in Minnesota wasn't illegal in Illinois, either, until we made it illegal. Allowing the Titanic to leave with life-rafts for only 50% of its maximum capacity wasn't illegal either, until we made it illegal.

[WarmWash]

I think there are around 7 people who pay for a grok subscription.

[plaidthunder]

I don't find this reassuring, because Elon's playbook is to force the public to purchase anything of his which doesn't do well on its own. Maybe a nice $1.776 trillion dollar tax funded investment into "unwoke" AI. :D

[arppacket]

Yeah, his current playbook is to get the public to fund his Nazi propaganda machine of X + Grok. Letting a billionaire tie that heinous stuff to critical space infrastructure and use 401k money from all Americans to fund it is a criminal indictment of our entire system!