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Comment on Ask HN: Has anybody made money off of AI in prod?

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Regular reminder that profit is a trailing indicator of success. If something is growing fast and bringing in revenue, you should be spending money to grow it as fast as possible. So profit *should* be negative while it's growing. When the growth phase is nearly complete (because you've saturated the market) you can stop spending on growth and bank most of the revenue as profit.

OpenAI will have $2B revenue this year [0]. Presumably the plan is to double that a few more times over a few years, after which they'll have a big profitable business.

[0] https://www.ft.com/content/81ac0e78-5b9b-43c2-b135-d11c47480...

If you've got $4B to set on fire, you can have $2B of "revenue" selling dollar bills for 50 cents. That doesn't mean that throwing another $20B on the fire is going to suddenly turn profitable.

The better question is: did the people that paid OpenAI $2B get value from that expense?

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