Soundtrack: Mack Glocky - Chasing Cars
Last week, I spent a great deal of time and words framing the generative AI industry as a cynical con where OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei have used a compliant media and braindead investors to frame unprofitable, unsustainable, environmentally-damaging and mediocre cloud
Fair. But the current business model isn’t becoming profitable by growing the userbase. It’s first giving out things for free to grow the userbase, and then becoming profitable by adding enshittification. So I’d argue this is just the more modern approach. But I get the point.
Yes, but the article goes on to say that when the userbase of paid customers grows the model becomes less sustainable as those paid numbers go up. It costs more money to support new paid users than those users can pay. More compute power, more resources, and larger models (which also become exponentially expensive and unsustainable due to the lack of clean training data).
Fair. But the current business model isn’t becoming profitable by growing the userbase. It’s first giving out things for free to grow the userbase, and then becoming profitable by adding enshittification. So I’d argue this is just the more modern approach. But I get the point.
Yes, but the article goes on to say that when the userbase of paid customers grows the model becomes less sustainable as those paid numbers go up. It costs more money to support new paid users than those users can pay. More compute power, more resources, and larger models (which also become exponentially expensive and unsustainable due to the lack of clean training data).