the claim that "AI companies can't be profitable" is pretty general. people just assume it based on how OpenAI operates, spending heavily to push innovation. I pay for several small AI tools monthly, and with good business plans, these companies can probably be profitable
OpenAI can be profitable, especially in the case where they make their own hardware because then the only cost that they have to pay is the energy cost and don't have to worry about cost of renting a GPU. And if they have very good hardware to run AI models they don't even have to worry about building their own models anymore. They can just use one of the open source one's like LLama or mistral and be done with it.
>[companies say] First, the technology is going to usher in a revolution akin to the advent of fire, nuclear weapons, and the internet. And second, it is going to cost almost unfathomable sums of money.<p>The first is probably true. With the second though, AI would still happen without huge spending. I think what we are seeing is more a land grab arms race from the tech companies to try to grab the fruits.
Bit of a clickbait title there, which the Atlantic has already changed to the more factual "Silicon Valley’s Trillion-Dollar Leap of Faith".<p>It's not difficult to imagine profitable uses of AI: deploying an open-source model to respond to customer support emails almost certainly costs less than the yearly salary of a script-reading customer service agent, and while the quality won't be great, what it replaces isn't great either.<p>It is, however, indeed difficult to justify spending $100 million on training a single model like Anthropic apparently wants to.
AI will be profitable once they figure out how to inject ads into every response. Queue the horror, but everyone enlightened knows it's inevitable.