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

by fracternal on 6/11/2024, 9:23:41 AM with 5 comments
So much hype around the ai space and it feels like every new startup on the planet has AI in it one way or another. Are we kidding ourselves that this can actually go into prod and make companies profit positive vs the old way of doing things or do you think this is an actual inevitable reality?

Has any company even made any money here? Hallucinations are still super high. I’ve seen a few examples where the model is deterministic and trained heavily on certain prompts but it starts to get into the gray area of just being rules based. What do you think?

  • by petercooper on 6/11/2024, 11:07:16 AM

    I use AI pretty heavily but as a tool to help me scale up my usual work and cover more ground than I otherwise could (so very much "human in the loop"). So AI makes me and many other people money, but not through the direct provision of AI services to the public (though even there, it's all over the place - Bloomberg has AI news analysis and stuff in their terminal now, for example).

  • by tlb on 6/11/2024, 10:04:54 AM

    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...

  • by xenospn on 6/11/2024, 9:34:50 AM

    NVIDIA. Picks and shovels.