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LLM Inevitabilism

(tomrenner.com)
1616 points SwoopsFromAbove | 14 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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lsy ◴[] No.44568114[source]
I think two things can be true simultaneously:

1. LLMs are a new technology and it's hard to put the genie back in the bottle with that. It's difficult to imagine a future where they don't continue to exist in some form, with all the timesaving benefits and social issues that come with them.

2. Almost three years in, companies investing in LLMs have not yet discovered a business model that justifies the massive expenditure of training and hosting them, the majority of consumer usage is at the free tier, the industry is seeing the first signs of pulling back investments, and model capabilities are plateauing at a level where most people agree that the output is trite and unpleasant to consume.

There are many technologies that have seemed inevitable and seen retreats under the lack of commensurate business return (the supersonic jetliner), and several that seemed poised to displace both old tech and labor but have settled into specific use cases (the microwave oven). Given the lack of a sufficiently profitable business model, it feels as likely as not that LLMs settle somewhere a little less remarkable, and hopefully less annoying, than today's almost universally disliked attempts to cram it everywhere.

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alonsonic ◴[] No.44570711[source]
I'm confused with your second point. LLM companies are not making any money from current models? Openai generates 10b USD ARR and has 100M MAUs. Yes they are running at a loss right now but that's because they are racing to improve models. If they stopped today to focus on optimization of their current models to minimize operating cost and monetizing their massive user base you think they don't have a successful business model? People use this tools daily, this is inevitable.
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lordnacho ◴[] No.44570853[source]
Are you saying they'd be profitable if they didn't pour all the winnings into research?

From where I'm standing, the models are useful as is. If Claude stopped improving today, I would still find use for it. Well worth 4 figures a year IMO.

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jsnell ◴[] No.44570962[source]
They'd be profitable if they showed ads to their free tier users. They wouldn't even need to be particularly competent at targeting or aggressive with the amount of ads they show, they'd be profitable with 1/10th the ARPU of Meta or Google.

And they would not be incompetent at targeting. If they were to use the chat history for targeting, they might have the most valuable ad targeting data sets ever built.

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1. bugbuddy ◴[] No.44571061[source]
I heard majority of the users are techies asking coding questions. What do you sell to someone asking how to fix a nested for loop in C++? I am genuinely curious. Programmers are known to be the stingiest consumers out there.
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2. LtWorf ◴[] No.44571134[source]
According to fb's aggressively targeted marketing, you sell them donald trump propaganda.
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3. cuchoi ◴[] No.44571182[source]
I'm not sure that stereotype holds up. Developers spend a lot: courses, cloud services, APIs, plugins, even fancy keyboards.

A quick search shows that click on ads targeting developers are expensive.

Also there is a ton of users asking to rewrite emails, create business plans, translate, etc.

4. disgruntledphd2 ◴[] No.44571264[source]
You'd probably do brand marketing for Stripe, Datadog, Kafka, Elastic Search etc.

You could even loudly proclaim that the are ads are not targeted by users which HN would love (but really it would just be old school brand marketing).

5. Lewton ◴[] No.44571269[source]
> I heard majority of the users are techies asking coding questions.

Citation needed? I can't sit on a bus without spotting some young person using ChatGPT

6. disgruntledphd2 ◴[] No.44571275[source]
It's very important to note that advertisers set the parameters in which FB/Google's algorithms and systems operate. If you're 25-55 in a red state, it seems likely that you'll see a bunch of that information (even if FB are well aware you won't click).
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7. jsnell ◴[] No.44572071[source]
OpenAI has half a billion active users.

You don't need every individual request to be profitable, just the aggregate. If you're doing a Google search for, like, the std::vector API reference you won't see ads. And that's probably true for something like 90% of the searches. Those searches have no commercial value, and serving results is just a cost of doing business.

By serving those unmonetizable queries the search engine is making a bet that when you need to buy a new washing machine, need a personal injury lawyer, or are researching that holiday trip to Istanbul, you'll also do those highly commercial and monetizable searches with the same search engine.

Chatbots should have exactly the same dynamics as search engines.

8. yamazakiwi ◴[] No.44572254[source]
A lot of people use it for cooking and other categories as well.

Techies are also great for network growth and verification for other users, and act as community managers indirectly.

9. naravara ◴[] No.44572375[source]
The existence of the LLMs will themselves change the profile and proclivities of people we consider “programmers” in the same way the app-driven tech boom did. Programmers who came up in the early days are different from ones who came up in the days of the web are different from ones who came up in the app era.
10. tsukikage ◴[] No.44572688[source]
…for starters, you can sell them the ability to integrate your AI platform into whatever it is they are building, so you can then sell your stuff to their customers.
11. LtWorf ◴[] No.44573190{3}[source]
I'm not even in USA and I've never been in USA in my entire life.
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12. JackFr ◴[] No.44573270[source]
You sell them Copilot. You Sell them CursorAI. You sell them Windsurf. You sell them Devin. You sell the Claude Code.

Software guys are doing much, much more than treating LLM's like an improved Stack Overflow. And a lot of them are willing to pay.

13. disgruntledphd2 ◴[] No.44580145{4}[source]
Wow, that's either a bug or an incredibly incompetent advertiser.
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14. LtWorf ◴[] No.44581329{5}[source]
Are we surprised someone working for trump is not competent?