How foolish do you have be to be worrying about ROI right now? The companies that are building out the datacenters produce billions per year in free cash flow. Maybe OP would prefer a dividend?
I say direct, because Chrome is free to users, yet clearly has a benefit to Google worth spending on both development and advertising the browser to users, and analogous profit sources may be coming to LLMs for similar reasons — you can use it locally so long as you don't mind every third paragraph being a political message sponsored by the Turquoise Party of Tumbrige Wells.
No it's not. Facebook hit $2B in Revenue in late 2010 - early 2011, ~5 years after its founding.
https://dazeinfo.com/2018/11/14/facebook-revenue-and-net-inc...
All you have to do is point to bankrupt bookseller Amazon, whom that dumb Jeff Bezos ran into the ground with his money-losing strategy for years. Clearly it doesn't work!
And yes, venture capital investing involves high risk, of which all participants are fully aware, and intentionally looking for.
We're talking <2 years since ChatGPT went viral for the first time. Generally these stories take at least 10 years to play out. Uber was unprofitable for 15 years. Now they're profitable. Every VC-backed startup is unprofitable and barely keeping the lights on for many years. None have reached 100M active users in a matter of weeks like ChatGPT.
They absolutely might fail. But the level of pessimism here is just plain funny. How much money are you willing to bet against them ever getting profitable?
These reflexive humanist anti-AI takes are going to age like peeled bananas.
The early internet was a public project, it didn't have to worry about its own return because the point was to build a robust communications system that could survive a nuclear strike. Seeing as Openai is trying to change to a for profit corporation, it's hardly an apt comparison.
