Zos_Kia

That was a classic House MD episode 🎖️

So for the first 20 years or 2/3 of the entire history of the company, they were unprofitable or barely profitable.

We must have a wildly different definition of “barely profitable”. Half a billion in 2004 money is a lot of profit, a billion back to back in 2009 and 2010 is a lot of profit.

I think you’re confusing Amazon with the next generation of loss-leader companies. Let’s talk Uber, let’s talk Twitter, if we want to point at “hugely unprofitable” companies. But Amazon is a beast of its own, they have a very coherent financial story. Even during their money-losing decade they posted insane results, frequently multiplying revenue while barely increasing operating costs.

Oh thanks for clarifying in even more excruciating details how a subtraction works that is really helpful.

Why would you repeat the lie that they’re “usually unprofitable” when the information is publically available in a million places on the internet ? In 2023 Amazon made :

• 575B$ in sales
• If you remove costs of goods that’s 270B$ in gross profit
• If you remove operating expenses (including R&D) that’s 30B$ in net income

Amazon is factually not “usually unprofitable”, they have in fact made profit (as in money which actually goes into your pocket after discounting all expenses) every year for the last 15 years except in 2022 and some tiny losses in 2014 and 2012.

I have one kid. Don’t really want a second one. No fucking regrets he’s a swell dude, he’s smart as fuck and has a gentle heart that just warms my soul. Also thanks to modern schooling he’s got some amazing psychological skills like identifying his and others’ emotions, processing them before reacting, etc… Coming from a stupid family that’s shit i learned to do in my 30s and he was already working on it at 3. That’s stuff he won’t need to power through with weed and alcohol in his 20s i guess.

Sure the world is considerably more shit now than it was when he was born, which is dumb because he’s only 6. But hey the world was shit before and every time period brings its own brand of anxiety and uncertainty. With kids you learn to take things day by day and not dwell so much on what you don’t control. You have to accept the universe on its own terms, that’s the whole point of psychological and philosophical integration after all.

Thanks for clarifying that profit is calculated using a subtraction, but you’re missing the core of my comment. Amazon self-finance their R&D and STILL make a fuck load of profit. They made like 30B$ of free cash last year alone. In the last 15 years they’ve made >100B$ in overall profit and only been in the red twice.

They’re not just profitable they’re an insane money printing machine that doesn’t show any sign of slowing down.

There’s absolutely no doubt that lower-end models are going to keep improving and that inference will keep getting cheaper. It won’t be on a Raspberry but my money’s with you. In 6 years you’ll be able to buy some cheap-ish specialized hardware to run open models on and they’re gonna be at least as capable as today’s frontier models while burning a fraction of the energy.

In fact i wouldn’t be surprised if frontier models were somehow overtaken by vastly cheaper models in the long run. The whole “trillion parameter count” paradigm feels very hacky and ripe for radical simplification. And wouldn’t it be hilarious ? All those suckers spending billions building a moat only to see it swept under their feet.

That’s a long established myth. Amazon started out in 94, and became profitable in like 10 years. Most of their hardcore R&D is self-financed cause they generate just that much free cash.

What is tiring about this conversation is that you have to balance real historically documented dangers of tolerating fascists, versus the theoretical dangers of whatever some internet person thinks might happen in an imaginary future.

I mean, it’s a tough call, right? “Regulating food sounds nice in theory but what if it gives some future government the power to ban pizza haha gotcha”.

I do it because it’s easy and it’s free but if it was difficult i’d probably still do it.

Yeah I remember when I started my career 15 years ago they were already trying to re-internalize projects after having horrible off -shore experience…

Oh yeah the John Wick hangover is a real thing !

Yeah that’s the fun of movies and art in general. I find it empty because it did not speak to me on a personal level but of course that’s probably cause i’m missing the whole entire point of it.

That’s very valid but there’s one thing I don’t understand : how can the ending affect the whole experience? To me that’s like saying “sex is meh because the shower afterwards is boring”. Don’t know if I’m making sense lol

To me, most endings are mediocre because endings are just very hard to write. It is very rare to have both the elements for a great story, and the setup for a great ending. In that context I feel like investing too much on the ending hurts the whole experience, whereas a weak ending just hurts the last ten minutes.

I saw it randomly in the theater when it came out, and I was probably a bit too young. It blasted my fucking face off lol. So gritty and dark, I guess like most Fincher movies it’s more about the atmosphere than anything else.

But then as a stand alone movie on mental illness it is so mediocre. I feel that it’s only palatable if you’re into popcorn movies and have no reference of good psychological drama.

You seem to hate them for the exact reason people love it - that’s the sign of a cool movie. It’s not a work of art by any stretch, but it knows what it is and it executes well.

I love the WASD Code it’s just built like a workhorse. Their newer models have backlighting but it’s all white, the only thing you can RGB is the 3 indicator LEDs (caps lock etc…) which are very discrete and personalizing them is entirely optional. No software, everything is done & stored on-board. They’re pricy but usually they’ll have some banger black friday or holiday sales.

For the level of investment in and hype around this company? Yes, those enterprise sales are abysmal

I don’t see the connection. How are enterprise sales specifically relevant here ? Are enterprise customers known for jumping on top of early stage products where you’re from ? Cause where i’m from they’re known for being the last ones to board.

They have demonstrated zero ability at actually “hyperscale”.

How would you define hyperscale ? They have one of the biggest GPU fleets around and are likely serving trillions of tokens monthly. That falls well within the range of my personal definition.

They have no path to getting those costs down. Their conversion rate from free to paid users is atrocious, and they’re already raising prices on their plans which is only going to worsen those conversion rates

That’s just stuff you say. Atrocious (in your opinion), no path to getting those costs down (in your opinion). Alright, we get it, that’s not a company you’d invest in, but then again your investment thesis seems pretty conservative. If a company has to make billions of enterprise sales in its 2nd year, and have double digits conversion early on, then there’s not that many successful companies you would have invested in. You certainly wouldn’t have put a dime in Uber at 48B valuation 7 years ago - well those who did made a nice return on their investment.

Is it possible that they could be successful? Yes. But a lottery ticket would probably be a sounder investment.

Isn’t that the definition of VC-backed startups ? The alternative would be to build a time machine, travel back to the 18th century, and invest in the British textile industry. Sadly they don’t make this kind of predictible, risk-free and quickly profitable enterprises nowadays.

Absolutely oozing confidence there

Oh i won’t be the one to contradict you here. Sama is one sleazy motherfucker, that’s just written on his face. Sadly it doesn’t preclude him from building a historical hyperscaler with OpenAI.

Because they spend $2.35 billion in operating costs for every $1 billion in revenue

This is entirely true but also completely normal for a hyperscaler in its first years. At this stage demonstrating a huge demand and your capacity to capture a lot of it is much more important than profitability. You don’t exactly bootstrap a company at this level of CapEx.

Their revenue is still growing at a staggering rate, showing no signs of slowing down, and enterprise sales are pretty respectable. I don’t know that i’d call 3/4 of a billion in enterprise sales abysmal for a startup in its 2nd year. YMMV i guess.

Sure there is some uncertainty about their model but that’s what VC backing is for, right ? They’re not building tin can factories with known and predictable business trends, and being valued at 40x your yearly revenue (not profit !) is pretty banal for a successful early stage Deep Tech. We may personally think it’s bullshit and choose not to invest in it but it’s still far from outrageous and very far from the definition of a bubble.

I don’t think it’s just Lemmy, i had similar conversations on Reddit. People don’t realize that the companies they claim are over-valued actually have very strong business fundamentals. That’s why in articles like OP’s they will never mention any names or figures. I guess it’s very convincing for outsiders but it doesn’t stand any amount of scrutiny.

If you take OpenAI for example, they went from 0 to 3.6B$ annual revenue in just two fucking years. How is that not worth a boatload of money ? Even Uber didn’t have that kind of growth and they burned a LOT more cash than OpenAI is burning right now.

As for the “AI quantum computing blockchain reeeee” projects… well they have a very hard time raising money right now and when they do, it’s at pretty modest valuations. The market is not as dumb as it is portrayed.