this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2026
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[–] Rothe@piefed.social 90 points 5 days ago (10 children)

Your local grocery store is more profitable than OpenAI. In fact you are more profitable than OpenAI.

OpenAI owes hundreds of billions of dollars, with a revenue a fraction of that. They will never become profitable.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 26 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (3 children)

They will never become profitable.

If you look at OpenAI as a single, independent, private company then they appear unprofitable. But when you look at them as a means of laundering Pentagon money and other federal contracts into straw purchases for NVIDIA and Oracle, they are immensely profitable.

AI is a Loss Leader. It props up the production and sale of hardware, which has been fruitful for its partners, its investors, and the economy as a whole. It is a digital form of induced demand in so far as new construction creates a "virtuous" cycle of increasing consumption, as more and more of the business and public sector is dragged into its orbit.

The end-game for OpenAI is to have a captured market of businesses and government institutions. Whole sectors of the economy devoid of human knowledge workers who are hopelessly addicted to AI Agent processes, because nobody managing the companies actually know what these agents are doing anymore. At this point, Altman and Amodei can charge whatever they damned well please for token traffic, because there's no bureaucracy capable of competing with them.

[–] JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 15 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Most of the money getting funneled to Nvidia came from them in the first place. That's why they're one of the chatbot's biggest cheerleaders.

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[–] abbadon420@sh.itjust.works 13 points 5 days ago (2 children)

The Weimar Republic was more profitable... well no, maybe not. But you get the sentiment.

[–] brotundspiele@sh.itjust.works 19 points 5 days ago (1 children)

They made trillions of marks, so yes they were extremely profitable.

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 21 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

I like that they never lost their gusto with the designs of the bills lol

Like they had to know that their currency was basically dead, yet they still made sure that those 100 billion Mark notes looked classy as fuck.

If/when the modern US makes it to this point, I can't imagine them putting all that much effort into making our $100 billion dollar bills look cool.

They'll probably have fucking Steve Bannon's face on them.

[–] naught101@lemmy.world 16 points 4 days ago

The person designing them had to make them pretty because they knew they were going to be paid in them

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[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 13 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (4 children)

I mean, you joke. But Germany pivoted out of the Great Depression far faster than its European peers precisely because they weren't afraid to print a bunch of money and pay people to do things.

The Fascists inherited one of the only recovering economies in Europe by the time they took power in 1932. And when they assumed office, they brought investment from the Americans overseas (who were having their own fascist turn), because they were willing to purge or enslave local populations, tear down neighborhoods, and build up whatever capital Standard Oil, IBM, and Ford Motor Company asked of them.

On the opposite side of the Atlantic and on the other side of the Urals, progressive liberals and Soviet communists were trying out a leftist mirror of this strategy. They were using the levers of the state to mobilize the masses of unemployed labor into productive capital improvements for the benefit of the public at-large. So the US, Germany, Japan, and the USSR all rapidly emerged out of the '29 crash into a booming 1930s economy. Meanwhile, England and France and much of Latin America and North Africa languished under artificial constraints of state-capitalism.

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[–] kurt_vonnegut2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 87 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

So you're saying we should be pumping all our savings and pension money in WinRar?

[–] MolochHorridus@piefed.social 36 points 5 days ago (1 children)
[–] yermaw@sh.itjust.works 13 points 5 days ago (1 children)

If they can get their sales into double digits, the sky's the limit!

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[–] Atomic@sh.itjust.works 9 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Tech companies are expected to be run at a loss for quite some time before they start being profitable.

They were founded in 2015 and "officially" launched GPT in 2022 to the public. If they make profits by 2032, that would be in line with how other tech companies established themselves.

For example, Spotify wasn't profitable until 2024. They launched in 2008.

So, I don't know why them not being profitable is what everyone is talking about. They're not expected to be profitable until 2030 at the earliest. And every serious investor know this.

Yes I'm very fun at parties. But it seems that a lot of people just do not understand the expected timelines of tech companies.

[–] HK65@sopuli.xyz 19 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Okay but the world had enough money to bankroll Spotify for 20 years. It doesn't have the kind of money OpenAI needs.

[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

And Spotify was barely making a loss AND had a lot of revenue. They were just putting more capital into infrastructure, etc. instead of profits.

[–] Atomic@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago

Excuse me? From 2017 to 2022. Spotify lost an average of ~430 million euro per year. And they weren't profitable from 2008 to 2016 either... -0.43 billion per year is not "barely making a loss". But investors saw potential and they kept funding.

[–] Atomic@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago

When it comes to technology that nations consider existential to their existence. There is always enough money.

[–] uen3@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

They have to at least have a plausible path to profitability. The serious investors have known for some time there isn't one with AI. Just because the AI companies will never be profitable long term doesn't mean there is no reason to invest in them short term. That's what a speculative bubble is. Everyone believes the line will keep going up long enough for them to turn around and sell to a greater fool in the near future. And for the most part they're right. The ultimate bag-holder ends up being the middle class worker and their auto-assigned 401k portfolio.

[–] Atomic@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago

They have multiple plausible paths to profitability. To claims there's none is just stupid. If they succeed or not is another question. But it's absolutely plausible.

The product and profitability towards the average citizen of the world, is such a microscopic part of their goals. People using their product is nothing more than data to feed their model. When they're done. Their profits are not going to come from people. It's going to come from the US government and companies. The investments being poured into OpenAI isn't just disappearing into a black hole, lots of it remains in the hardware and digital infrastructure required for the project.

Even if their public worth drops to 0. They will still keep being funded. Because the research is too important to let go of.

[–] ExtraJudgement@lemmy.world 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Proprietary frontier LLMs in companies riddled with highly suspect business practices.

My local LLM setup has absolutely been making the equivalence of positive cashflow for me since gemma 4 and qwen 3.8: I need less total time for several groups of annoying (but necessary) tasks, which means my productivity is up and I can use the rest as my own free time.

[–] late_pessimistic@slrpnk.net 4 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I need less total time for several groups of annoying (but necessary) tasks

Such as? Just curious what people use LLMs for.

[–] ExtraJudgement@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)
  • Answer questions (with references) about source code and documentation
  • Add clear-bounded features to a pre-existing codebase
  • Transpile between programming languages

Stuff I can do myself perfectly well, but the results - after postprocessing - are indistinguishable from me having done so. Even when accounting for everything (including hallucinations) the time savings are real: Renewables-powered electricity is cheaper than my attention. By a lot.

Caveat: This only works if you're already a domain expert and if you do it exclusively for too long, you might be at risk of ceasing to be such an expert. Don't use it to try and do the thinking for you.

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[–] zarkanian@sh.itjust.works 27 points 5 days ago (14 children)

I was finally starting to save up money in a 401k for retirement. Then I got fired. Now the AI bubble is going to burst and nuke what little money is in my 401k. FML.

[–] jaybone@lemmy.zip 14 points 5 days ago (2 children)

I’m trying to stick with it, and not pull a bunch of money out. If this is all just insider trading back and forth, my hope is it will recover over time and level out. (As that will be in the interest of the manipulators too.)

If it’s just a big crash, like 1929 style, then I figure we’re all fucked whether you have stocks or dollar bills or CDs or doubloons.

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[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 20 points 4 days ago (1 children)

“I remember once my father and I were walking down Fifth Avenue and there was a homeless person sitting right outside of Trump Tower and I remember my father pointing to him and saying, ‘You know, that guy has $8 billion more than me,’ because he was in such extreme debt at that point, you know?”

~ Ivanka Trump

[–] stoy@lemmy.zip 27 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I refuse to believe that Trump is capable of such introspection.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 16 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Believe it or not, Trump's become dumber with age.

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[–] whaleross@lemmy.world 22 points 5 days ago (2 children)

And a more reliable product that returns the expected results every time.

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[–] affenlehrer@feddit.org 14 points 4 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

I like LLMs and also the research but I think we're at a point where one could make a pause, turn the models into silicon and sell them as hardware for people who are actually interested.

That would solve all privacy problems, eliminate many data centers, subscription fees, internet dependencies and allow for slower and more thoughtful upgrades (hardware isn't updated as often as software). That would be a pretty sovereign solution.

However, from a company perspective they can't force it on everyone anymore, don't get all the juicy data from all the users and can't sell subscriptions any more and change everything on their side.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 7 points 4 days ago (18 children)

turn the models into silicone

The models are data, and silicone is rubber. So... I don't know what you're proposing here.

[–] cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.works 6 points 4 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

I believe he is suggesting we turn them into very large breasts, or in some cases big booties, depending on your preference and what part of the world you're in.

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[–] BilSabab@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

at this rate Winamp might get more profitable than OpenAI and it is free.

[–] Jumi@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

But isn't OpenAI just burning billions of moneys already? In that case Winamp is already more profitable

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[–] forbiddencherry@lemmy.today 21 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (4 children)

I'm one of the seeming few who paid to register it back in the Win9x days. Turned out that the key also works for the non-free Linux version (think I only ever bothered to set that up once). These days gzipped tarballs or squashfs with zstd are my go-tos. The former for speed with source trees or such, and the latter for filesystem backups or larger directories, because loop mounting it is so fast and convenient.

[–] SpruceBringsteen@lemmy.world 31 points 5 days ago (1 children)

These days gzipped tarballs or squashfs with zstd are my go-tos.

What the fuck did you just call me?

[–] TARgz@lemmy.world 18 points 5 days ago (2 children)
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[–] Jaysyn@lemmy.world 13 points 5 days ago (12 children)

I wonder what will happen in 2027 when those repayments come due.

[–] snooggums@piefed.world 16 points 4 days ago (1 children)

They will get an extension based on lies about ai genocide or something.

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[–] m532@lemmy.ml 9 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Capitalists: Noo its bad, see, it doesn't make profit

Communists: Free AI for everyone

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[–] greygore@lemmy.world 11 points 5 days ago

Actually, I’m pretty sure WeWork was more profitable than OpenAI, both in absolute dollars and percentage.

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