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Amazon was unprofitable for over a decade, and they were public. Theres no incentive to be profitable as a private company if you can continue to raise money.

Ed Zitron and Gary Marcus are... confused.

by mynameisash6 hours ago|

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> Amazon was unprofitable for over a decade, and they were public.

Amazon was unprofitable because they poured their revenue into growth. On paper, they were in the red, but everyone - especially investors - saw what was going to happen, given their trajectory.

Is it the case that any of these AI companies are actually making a ton of money and growing accordingly? AFAICT, we've just got [a] big players like Google that can subsidize AI in the hopes of waiting everyone else out and [b] private companies raising capital in the hopes that when the market returns to rationality, they may be solvent.

by overrun116 hours ago|

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Yes that is exactly what is happening. OpenAI and Anthropic are the fastest growing companies by revenue ever and their gross profit margins are healthy.

by mynameisash5 hours ago|

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According to this article[0]:

> HSBC Global Investment Research projects that OpenAI still won’t be profitable by 2030, even though its consumer base will grow by that point to comprise some 44% of the world’s adult population (up from 10% in 2025). Beyond that, it will need at least another $207 billion of compute to keep up with its growth plans.

This article is from six months ago. Was HSBC wrong; did something dramatically change in the last six months; is OpenAI not, in fact, profitable?, or are they in fact doing well but doing a huge investment (as was the case with Amazon 25ish years ago)?

I genuinely do not know, but my impression is that they're burning investment capital trying to compete with others' investment capital and Google's bottomless pockets.

[0] https://fortune.com/2025/11/26/is-openai-profitable-forecast...

by LetsGetTechnicl2 hours ago|

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Also OpenAI somehow having 44% of the world’s population as its customer base is a plainly absurd goal and will never happen, not in 5 years

by dsdsfaa3 hours ago|

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and to make matters worse, they are massively over-valued.

Whoever buys the stock at a richly priced 1tn at ipo is a bozo lmao. I know I know, index funds will be forced to hold it bypassing the 1 year rule. Disaster already.

by LetsGetTechnicl2 hours ago|

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Then why do they constantly need more and more funding from VC and Google and MS and NVIDIA? Why is it all circular dealing? Why aren’t there smaller AI startups running these smaller, “profitable” models?

by timmytokyo6 hours ago|

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But I've been told here -- over and over again -- that the cost of inference was going to go down as the technology matured.

The trend lines are going in the opposite direction.

by goosejuice7 hours ago|

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His entire brand is that the AI bubble will burst. By his account it was supposed to have several times by now. Like the doomers, it's not if it's when and they have to keep pushing back their predictions. Funny how both camps can be so confident. Alas, that's how they get eyes, ears and dollars.

That's not to say they will be or are wrong, it's just that they aren't exactly unbiased, or humble, sources.