Because typically one expect a return on investment with that level of spending. Not only have they run at a loss for years, their spending is expected to increase, with no path to profitability in sight.
Tbh this whole AI thing is probably a negative ROI but it will pay off. Even if the debt is written off the AI enhancements that this whole misallocation of capital created are now "sunk" and are here to stay - the assets and techniques have been built.
There's an element of arms race between players, and the genie is out of the bottle now so have to move with it. Game theory is more driving this than economics in the short term.
Marginal gains on top of these investments probably have a ROI now (i.e. new investments from this point).
IIRC, current estimates are that OpenAI is losing as much money a year as Uber or Amazon lost in their entire lifetime of unprofitability. Also, both Uber and Amazon spent their unprofitable years having a clear roadmap to profitability. OpenAI's roadmap to profitability is "???"
I have lived through Amazon’s rags to riches and there was never a clear plan to profitability. Vast majority of people were questioning sanity of anyone investing in Amazon.
I am not saying OpenAI is Amazon but am saying I have seen this before where masses are going “oh business is bad, losses are huge, where is path to profitability…”
Your recollection is hazy. Bezos chose not to be profitable in order to grow the company, and reap greater rewards in the future. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wjLs22dNOCE
I don't know either way but every company does this, it's not saying anything meaningful to say that a new company is taking an "investment year" or two or ten.
I do know that in the late aughts, people were writing stories about how Amazon was a charity run on behalf of the American consumer by the finance industry.
and those stories were in the short run correct, since Amazon and Uber succeeded by massively undercutting existing businesses. reel customers in with charity, then turn the screws. what business is ChatGPT undercutting?
I think you're saying that just running up huge losses is sufficient to create a successful company? But that you personally wouldn't want to run up huge losses? Not sure.
nah, I am saying that many (super) successful businesses ran in red financially for a very long time. I would not run a business that way but I am also (fortunately) not a CEO of a multibillion dollar company
Somebody must not be old enough to remember Amazon before AWS. Maybe you also don’t remember that Amazon started selling books before becoming the world’s largest fencing for selling stolen merch. They used to be the butt of many jokes for losing so much money for so many years while they expanded warehouses.
Open source has an accepted and well understood meaning to developers; when people use the term to mean something other than that, it is 100% of the time for exploitative purposes, and they know they are being disingenuous.
I've used the term for 25+ years to describe my own source-included free software projects, and I'll thank you (and OSI) for not policing my language. No trademark? No standing. Choose other crusades.
Overreaction much? Nobody is policing. Your failure to recognize the meaning of a word - like any other - is just going to harm you due to your own ignorance of its ramifications.
(Shrug) As you will note at the top of the thread, williamstein is policing. All I'm doing is pointing out that the policeman has no badge, no gun, and no uniform, and that their cruiser looks suspiciously like a '92 Crown Victoria with black and white spray paint and a spotlight from Cabela's.
When you combine two words into a fundamentally novel phrase, you are not expressing an opinion, you are contributing to the global (or in this case, anglophone) dictionary.
So if you were to write that you are not in the habit of stealing from children, you might have your own idiosyncratic definition of "steal" or "child"?
Well, I certainly can't argue with that, um... logic.
Meanwhile, if anyone is entitled to the distinction of having "coined" the "fundamentally novel" phrase, it's a guy named Robert Steele who publicized the term "open source intelligence" in 1990 and organized the First International Symposium on Open Source Solutions in 1992.
Be that as it may, it's a generic phrase, as evinced by its prior usage in other fields like intelligence and journalism. Lacking a trademark, OSI has zero authority to word-police everyone else. No amount of plugging their ears and chanting lalalala will change the fact that OSI does not own exclusive rights to the phrase "open source." Not with respect to software, not with respect to anything else.
The author of the project in this article is perfectly within their rights to use the term, and the rest of us know very well what they mean by it.
"Steal" and "child" likewise lack any trademark protection.
So, suppose I accuse you of stealing from children, then when you protest, I
reply that the meaning I give those 2 words might not be the meaning most people have, but that is fine because no one owns the exclusive rights to those 2 words.
This is simply not true. Your heuristic is broken.
The recent Gemma 3 models, which are produced by Google (a little startup - heard of em?) outperform the last several OpenAI releases.
Closed does not necessarily mean better. Plus the local ones can be finetuned to whatever use case you may have, won't have any inputs blocked by censorship functionality, and you can optimize them by distilling to whatever spec you need.
Anyway all that is extraneous detail - the important thing is to decouple "open" and "small" from "worse" in your mind. The most recent Gemma 3 model specifically is incredible, and it makes sense, given that Google has access to many times more data than OpenAI for training (something like a factor of 10 at least). Which is of course a very straightforward idea to wrap your head around, Google was scrapign the internet for decades before OpenAI even entered the scene.
So just because their Gemma model is released in an open-source (open weights) way, doesn't mean it should be discounted. There's no magic voodoo happening behind the scenes at OpenAI or Anthropic; the models are essentially of the same type. But Google releases theirs to undercut the profitability of their competitors.
I'd argue meaning can have variable scope. Some meaning has the self (embodied self or otherwise) as a referent. Other meaning doesn't. If I tell you the traffic light is green, so you can walk, you catch the meaning. It isn't dependent on self.
...which is arguably the problem. Firefox. Thunderbird. That should be it. According to their own site, beyond that they have the browser app for mobile devices. A VPN service, an email-forwarding service, and MDN. Hardly 'many products'.
One could argue that the only product that really matters is the ability to have a default search engine. I checked out their Wikipedia[0] article and their financials table has a column dedicated to the percent of revenue derived from Google—81-95%, depending on the year.
It feels a little like when Microsoft invested in Apple back in the 90s. Microsoft needed Apple so they didn’t look like too much of a monopoly. Google has been funding Mozilla’s whole existence for at least 20 years. At first it may have purely been do dominate search, but at some point I think the incentives shifted to Google needing Firefox so they can claim they aren’t a monopoly in the browser space and competition exists.
You've clearly never built a product. One product alone requires a CEO. More than one, much more so.
And anyway you're factually wrong. They produce much more than what you listed, many of their undertakings are contributions to open-source, the development of web standards, underlying technologies that browsers (not just Firefox) use to render the web, etc.
You're being childish and somewhat absurdly so. Mozilla and Firefox are a large part of the reason the modern web is usable (in the technical sense - usability for the deaf and blind, screen readers, etc)
I was mostly just typing out what they had listed under 'products' on their pages. I'm aware of what Mozilla do, know folks there and that have been there.
They've been roundly criticised for adding 'products' of questionable value to their core userbase, rightly so in my opinion.
Yes, many of the projects have been failures -- just like at countless other companies -- but that doesn't change the fact that an organization needs a leader. Your original comment is still nonsensical.
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