aliceblossom

What's the game they're on a losing streak in?

Yeah, I did realize that the break even ones I think largely are using OpenAI as part or all of their capacity, so they probably aren't really break even for that reason - OpenAI is subsidizing them.

I have a little perspective to offer on this:

One of the core points of the author's argument is, "Generative AI providers are operating at a loss, and I don't see how they could become profitable", specifically calling out 'where are the new customers'?

I work at a company that is a direct customer of OpenAI and we get real, useful output from it. If they were to double or even triple the price, I'm almost certain that we'd just pay it (as it's I very cheap at the moment). I'll admit I'm not actually running numbers, iirc several of the companies mentioned were near break even, so doubling revenue would make them very profitable.

So my argument here is that I don't think they need new customers, they just need to raise prices. Launching with unprofitable prices and jacking them up later once people get a taste is part of the standard tech industry playbook and wouldn't be the least bit surprising in this situation. The company I work for has only small integrations so far, but I can imagine that at some companies almost their entire service is based on using LLMs, in which case the providers would literally have the ability to charge whatever they want.

Also fwiw, I'm a gen ai hater, and wish it would collapse and go away, but I'm not entirely convinced by this guy's argument, but maybe if I looked harder at the numbers it might become obvious that the price increases I'm suggesting still won't cover investment expenditures.

What's wild is that near the end of the sketch they say, "I can't think of anything worse than a skull." I'd say a noose is probably worse...

I discovered the artist recently when I was looking for a big centerpiece painting for a room I'm decorating. His work was exactly what I was looking for - something amazing but unsettling. I never came across this exact piece (I wish I had) but sadly it's virtually impossible to find (especially legitimate) prints of their work due to the "untitled" tendency.

Aw man, at first I thought this was an Android desktop OS. Android being in Google's pocket is trash, but you gotta admit the Android permissions system would be an enormous privacy/security upgrade over nearly all other Linux distros, especially factoring in ease of use/understandability (speaking as someone with a functional Qubes setup).

I've always been of the mind that the walk is for my dog - not for me. If he wants to stop and sniff something for a long time I let him because that's what makes the walk enjoyable for him. I will concede though that it's easy for me to adjust the total length of the walk based on how much stopping he does but that might not be the case for everyone.

Voxelated?

Hell yeah Royval! Was already a fan, now I'm a bigger fan.

I think they're trying really hard to not translate the name of the practice to make it seem cooler or esoteric or something. But it literally translates to "stomach 8 10 percents" 😂

I think it's possible, but I don't personally know. I started with that point/assumption because "Japanese is a hard language to learn" isn't generally true, but is true for English (only) speakers.

Since English spelling isn't phonetic, what you're saying isn't even possible, so no. Just to be clear, the word phonetic is doing a lot of heavy lifting here and it very specifically means the spelling produces perfectly unambiguous pronunciation which, as far as I know, has never been the case for English with the Latin alphabet. And if you think about it, that makes sense. You are using symbols from a completely different language to describe the sounds - there is zero guarantee there are enough symbols to describe all of the sounds unambiguously. You might be able to get there in combination (see "ch", one of our most stable letter combinations), but as soon as you do that, readers can no longer intuit what the sound should be. For example, for "ch" the sound for "c" (which is itself already ambiguous) plus the sound for "h" does not "make" the "ch" sound. Instead you'd get either "kuh" like in cousin or "sh" as in shush.