top 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] 167 points 2 months ago (4 children)

It's a weird business where everyone is offering an environmentally unsupportable service at below cost, hoping to outlive the competition.

Market share of a negative profit market.

  • source
  • hideshow 8 child comments
  • [–] 65 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    It worked for netflix and the steaming services. Now terrestrial (cable) is dead and adsupported streaming tiers have returned lol.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 51 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    It's how every tech company that "disrupts" a market or indistry works. Uber started of burning shit tons of cash operating at a loss till it replaced enough Taxi services then jacked up the prices.

    The problem with AI is that they cannot increase the prices enough to be profitable. The AI companies are waiting for future hardware tech that will be energy efficient enough to make AI profitable before they run out of capital to burn.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 21 points 2 months ago

    The problem with AI is that they cannot increase the prices enough to be profitable.

    I saw something about the SpaceX IPO that said for it to be justified at that price, everyone on earth with some sort of money (they defined it as earning at least $14,000/year) had to become an xAI consumer and spend $28,000/year. Seems reasonable /s

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    I was thinking about that, but it did make governments move to digital programming (eg BBC, NPO), which they likely wouldn't have done if it wasn't for Netflix. I think it also improved the internet speeds here in NL significantly.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 19 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    That's not correct - the BBC announced iPlayer in 2003, tested 2004 onwards and finally launched in 2007 after being delayed by lobbying. The iPlayer was held back from full launch due to concerns from commercial competitors - in particular broadband providers lobbied against the iPlayer service because they feared the "pressure" it would put on the broadband infrastructure.

    Netflix launched their streaming service in 2007.

    Netflix did not originate the idea of streaming (nor did the BBC to be clear), much like Apple didn't originate the smart phone. Netfiix did however do it better than it's competitors, particularly the incumbents in the commercial sector.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 12 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

    I remember iPlayer in 2007: it was a mess, using DRM and P2P, requiring a full download before watching it. I wouldn't call that a streaming service at all. Shows had to be watched within a week of broadcasting.

    I welcome feedback but starting a comment with 'thats not correct' and then blatantly being incorrect is just some ol' bullshit.

    I never mentioned that either of the companies originated the idea of streaming. I only posited that Netflix pushed governments (in this case the Dutch and UK) to move to digital programming.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    They did a better job by offering an unsustainable variety of programming from all the studios in one place at the same time. All of the competitors at the time only offered financially viable services.

    I believe in ai now because I looked at the Netflix balance sheet and thought. “There is NO WAY they could become profitable they are spending wayyy to much money and have way to much debt. It’s financially impossible to get out of this hole”

    I understand how it worked and how it could not have. There are a lot of ways this could fail on AI but there are some real ways forward. AI has a similar application reach as the internet. It’s world changing.

    I see why meta and google are going in hard. They lived though the rise and fall of blockbuster. They saw Sony release 3 different steaming services before after and during Netflix. This is the disruption for the current generation of tech and their revenue model.

    Someone is going to ‘Win’ AI and a lot of others will loose.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 52 points 2 months ago (5 children)

    So, people are falling for Anthropic's marketing scheme?

  • source
  • hideshow 9 child comments
  • [–] 32 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    Personally, I find myself using the Chinese alternatives more and more as they are just way cheaper.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
  • [–] 23 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    The good thing is that a deepseek can be run locally relatively well with consumer hardware. I trust chinese companies as much as i trust american companies with my data and my prompts.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago*

    Theres a lot of good models free online that are open source/Chinese and the only cost is a bit of slowness on my rig. No token limit or whatever. Totally agree.

    Its about as good as commercial products now...

  • source
  • parent
  • load more comments (1 reply)
  • load more comments (1 reply)
    [–] 20 points 2 months ago (4 children)
  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago (11 children)

    That depends; it will most likely cause some pretty serious issues outside the AI space. When that bubble finally pops, it'll probably make the dot-com bust look like a bathtub fart. Knock-on effects over non AI industries, and a lot of little bitch CEO's that put all their money/companies money in AI will now be out a whole lot of cash and go on (more) firing sprees.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 11 child comments
  • load more comments (11 replies)
  • load more comments (2 replies)
    [–] 18 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    AI is becoming a commodity. Companies with such high burn rates will have a hard time staying alive.

  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Especially with open weights models available from cloud AI providers.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah the open weight models are getting good enough that a lot of people can just host their own for most tasks.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    On what hardware? I have a 1yo laptop running Linux and it's slow AF on open source llms. Might be to do with video card drivers, but I'd be happy to hear suggestions on which machine to put next to my raspberry pi for a local LLM.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 11 points 2 months ago

    You don't really want to be running them on a laptop. You either need a big dedicate graphics card (with 16 GB of RAM preferably) or a unified RAM/VRAM machine like a mac mini or a strix halo.

    Local model running is definitely more doable now that it was a year ago but its not yet at the level of throw it on anything and it'll work fine.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 17 points 2 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 13 points 2 months ago*

    For those who didn’t read past the headline: OpenAI is still growing, but competition is growing faster.

  • source
  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago*

    I wish headlines would start to qualify market share. They had over 50% of the active usera/subscribers/acticity or something like that. The addressable market on the other hand isna lot more people and they probably never got anywhere close to 50% of that.

  • source
  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago

    The free market strikes again.

  • source
  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (3 children)
  • load more comments (2 replies)
    load more comments
    view more: next ›