• Gsus4@mander.xyz
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    22
    ·
    edit-2
    22 hours ago

    Lol, they sort of seem to know it’s all castles on clouds and any spark e.g. a substack post could trigger the loaded spring. Yet, nobody thinks they’ll be the ones holding bags of shit.

    • WanderingThoughts@europe.pub
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      19 hours ago

      They kind of know. The dot com crashed many companies, and also gave rise to Amazon. They’re all just hoping they’ll be the one that invested in the next Amazon.

        • WanderingThoughts@europe.pub
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          14
          ·
          18 hours ago

          Amazon didn’t make any profit for a decade and made 360 billion least year. They tell investors that AI will be the same.

          • Passerby6497@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            10 hours ago

            How much of that profit less decade was just them reinvesting in their company as opposed to burning money like you’re trapped on Everest and need every bit of heat you can get?

            • WanderingThoughts@europe.pub
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              10 hours ago

              That’s the part they didn’t tell investors. Some call that the enshittification of the investment market. Lies everywhere.

          • HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            9
            ·
            17 hours ago

            The difference was that Amazon knew how to make a profit, but was reinvesting into infrastructure plays and bigger fish.

            If they had to, they could have been a modestly profitable bookshop in 2002. AWS and monster logistics might not have developed to put them in the 13-digit club though.

            Does any AI-centric play have that fundamental fallback? The services that seem to be most effective at direct monetization, the coding tools, are typically running at huge losses. If they raised costs to cover, precious few firms will pay basically the salary of a senior dev for an emulation of an enthusiastic junior dev with an affinity for footguns.

            The less enterprise-focused products-- parasocial toys, image and video gen, will likely try to dip into consumer subs and advertising, but can that generate the cash volumes these platforms demand?

            • WanderingThoughts@europe.pub
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              5
              ·
              13 hours ago

              If people would always demand answers for those questions, we wouldn’t have speculative bubbles. For now, everybody seems to still believe the “it’s the worst it’ll ever be right now” and the “just more scaling bro” answers.