Opera browser was not profitable for like 15 years and still became rather profitable eventually to make an attractive target to purchase by external investors. And even if not bough it would still made nice profit eventually for the original investors.
Sure, but they were making tons of money elsewhere. OpenAI has no source of revenue anywhere big enough to cover its expenses, it's just burning investor cash at the moment.
Last Month, Google, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (very close to this one, likely passes it this month) were the only sites with more visits than chatgpt. Couple that with the 400M+ weekly active users (according to open ai in February) and i seriously doubt that.
Weekly active users is a pretty strange metric. Essential tools and even social networking apps report DAUs, and they do that because essential things get used daily. How many times did you use Google in the past day? How many times did you visit (insert some social media site you prefer) in the last day? If you’re only using something once per week, it probably isn’t that important to you.
Mostly only social media/messaging sites report daily active users regularly. Everything else usually reports monthly active users at best.
>in the last day? If you’re only using something once per week, it probably isn’t that important to you.
No, something I use on a weekly basis (which is not necessarily just once a week) is pretty important to me and spinning it otherwise is bizarre.
Google is the frontend to the web for the vast majority of internet users so yeah it gets a lot of daily use. Social media sites are social media sites and are in a league of their own. I don't think i need to explain why they would get a disproportionate amount of daily users.
I am entirely confused by this. ChatGPT is absolutely unimportant to me. I don't use it for any serious work, I don't use it for search, I find its output to still be mostly a novelty. Even coding questions I mostly solve using StackExchange searches because I've been burned using it a couple of times in esoteric areas. In the few areas where I actually did want some solid LLM output, I used Claude. If ChatGPT disappeared off the Internet tomorrow, I would suffer not at all.
And yet I probably duck into ChatGPT at least once a month or more (I see a bunch of trivial uses in 2024) mostly as a novelty. Last week I used it a bunch because my wife wanted a logo for a new website. But I could have easily made that logo with another service. ChatGPT serves the same role to me as dozens of other replaceable Internet services that I probably duck into on a weekly basis (e.g., random finance websites, meme generators) but have no essential need for whatsoever. And if I did have an essential need for it, there are at least four well-funded competitors with all the same capabilities, and modestly weaker open weight models.
It is really your view that "any service you use at least once a week must be really important to you?" I bet if you sat down and looked at your web history, you'd find dozens that aren't.
(PS in the course of writing this post I was horrified to find out that I'd started a subscription to the damn thing in 2024 on a different Google account just to fool around with it, and forgot to cancel it, which I just did.)
>I am entirely confused by this. ChatGPT is absolutely unimportant to me. I don't use it for any serious work, I don't use it for search, I find its output to still be mostly a novelty. Even coding questions I mostly solve using StackExchange searches because I've been burned using it a couple of times in esoteric areas. In the few areas where I actually did want some solid LLM output, I used Claude. If ChatGPT disappeared off the Internet tomorrow, I would suffer not at all.
OK? That's fine. I don't think I ever claimed you were a WAU
>And yet I probably duck into ChatGPT at least once a month or more (I see a bunch of trivial uses in 2024) mostly as a novelty.
So you are not a weekly active user then. Maybe not even a monthly active one.
>Last week I used it a bunch because my wife wanted a logo for a new website. But I could have easily made that logo with another service.
Maybe[1], but you didn't. And I doubt your wife needs a new logo every week so again not a weekly active user.
>ChatGPT serves the same role to me as dozens of other replaceable Internet services that I probably duck into on a weekly basis (e.g., random finance websites, meme generators)but have no essential need for whatsoever.
You visit the same exact meme generator or finance site every week? If so, then that site is pretty important to you. If not, then again you're not a weekly active user to it.
If you visit a (but not the same) meme generator every week then clearly creating memes is important to you because I've never visited one in my life.
>And if I did have an essential need for it, there are at least four well-funded competitors with all the same capabilities, and modestly weaker open weight models.
There are well funded alternatives to Google Search too but how many use anything else? Rarely does any valuable niche have no competition.
>It is really your view that "any service you use at least once a week must be really important to you?" I bet if you sat down and looked at your web history, you'd find dozens that aren't.
Yeah it is and so far, you've not actually said anything to indicate the contrary.
[1]ChatGPT had an image generation update recently that made it capable of doing things other services can't. Good chance you could not in fact do what you did (to the same satisfaction) elsewhere. But that's beside my point.
Yes corporate leaders do chase hype and they also believe in magic.
I think companies implement DEI initiatives for different reasons than hype though. Many are now abandoning DEI ostensibly out of fear due to the change in U.S. regime.
A case can be made for diversity, but the fact that all the big companies were adopting DEI at the same time made it hype.
I personally know an engineering manager who would scoff at MLK Day, but in 2020 starting screaming about how it wasn’t enough and we needed Juneteenth too.
AI isn’t hype at Nvidia, and DEI isn’t hype at Patagonia.
I think many were rightly adopting DEI initiatives in an environment post me-too and post George Floyd. I don’t think it was driven by hype but more a reaction to the environment which heightened awareness of societal injustices. Awareness led to all sorts of things - conversation, compassion, attempts to do better in society and the workplace, and probably law suits. You can question how motivated corporations were to adopt DEI initiatives but I think it’d be wrong to say it was driven by hype.
I’m not sure companies are “abandoning DEI” so much as realizing that it’s often only a vocal minority that cares about DEI reports and scores and you don’t actually need a VP and diversity office to do some outreach and tally internal metrics.
The climate has changed. Some of that is economic at big tech companies. But it’s also a ramping down of a variety of things most employers probably didn’t support but kept their mouths shut about.
It does anecdotally seem to be very common in education which presumably will carry over to professional workplaces over time. I see it a lot less in non-tech and even tech/adjacent adults today.
Aside from university mentioned by sibling comments, there is major uptake of AI in journalism (summarize long press statements, create first draft of the teaser, or even full articles ...) and many people in my social groups use it regularly for having something explained, finding something ... it's wide spread
My wife, the farthest you can get from the HN crowd, literally goes to tears when faced with Excel or producing a Word doc and she is a regular user of copilot and absolutely raves about it. Very unusual for her to take up new tech like this and put it to use but she uses it for everything now. Horse is out of the barn.
For many, this stuff is mostly about copilot being shoved down everyone's throats via ms office obnoxious ads and distractions, and I haven't yet heard of anyone liking it or perceiving it as an improvement. We are now years into this, so my bets are on the thing fading away slowly and becoming a taboo at Microsoft.
Many recent HN articles about how middle managers are already becoming addicted and forcing it on their peons. One was about the game dev industry in particular.
In my work I see semi-technical people (like basic python ability) wiring together some workflows and doing fairly interesting analytical things that do solve real problems. They are things that could have been done with regular code already but weren't worth the engineering investment.
In the "real world" I see people generating crummy movies and textbooks now. There is a certain type of person it definitely appeals to.
what I'm not so sure about is how much that generalises beyond the HN/tech-workers bubble (I don't think "people" in OP's comment is as broad and numerous as they think it is).
As much as you may make fun of my anecdotal observation, your comment doesn't add anything of value, in particular to substantiate that "people [are] becoming addicted to LLMs". I stand behind my comment that the vast majority of non-tech worker are exposed to them via Copilot in MS Office, and if you want to come to its rescue and pretend it's not a disaster, by all means :-)
Uber is a profitable company both in 2023 and - to the tune of billions of dollars - in 2024. Please read their financials if you doubt this statement.
I assume they mean the profits in the past couple years are dwarfed by the losses that came before. Looking at the company's entire history, instead of a single FY.
Seems like the difference between a profitable investment and a profitable company.
They invested tens of billions of dollars in destroying the competition to be able to recently gain a return on that investment. One could either write off that previous spending or calculate it into the totality of "Uber". I don't know how Silicon Valley economics works but, presumably, a lot of that previous spending is now in the form of debt which must be serviced out of the current profits. Not that I'm stating that taking on debt is wrong or anything.
To the extent that their past spending was debt, interest on that debt that should already be accounted for in calculating their net income.
But the way it usually works for Silicon Valley companies and other startups is that instead of taking on debt they raise money through selling equity. This is money that doesn't have to be paid back, but it means investors own a large portion of this now-profitable company.
I'm surprised. They pay the drivers a pittance. My ex drove Uber for a while and it wasn't really worth it. Also, for the customers it's usually more expensive and slower than a normal taxi at least here in Spain.
The original idea of ride-sharing made sense but just like airbnb it became an industry and got enshittified.
> They pay the drivers a pittance. My ex drove Uber for a while and it wasn't really worth it.
I keep hearing this online, but every time I’ve used an Uber recently it’s driven by someone who says they’ve been doing it for a very long time. Seems clear to me that it is worth it for some, but not worth it if you have other better job options or don’t need the marginal income.
> but not worth it if you have other better job options
Pretty much any service job, really...
When I had occasion to take a ride share in Phoenix I'd interrogate the driver about how much they were getting paid because I drove cabs for years and knew how much I would have gotten paid for the same trip.
Let's just say they were getting paid significantly less than I used to for the same work. If you calculated in the expenses of maintaining a car vs. leasing a cab I expect the difference is even greater.
There were a few times where I had just enough money to take public transportation down to get a cab and then snag a couple cash calls to be able to put gas in the car and eat. Then I could start working on paying off the lease and go home at the end of the day with some cash in my pocket -- there were times (not counting when the Super Bowl was in town) where I made my rent in a single day.
PS: I know that in Romania it's the opposite. Uber is kinda like a luxury taxi there. Normal taxis have standard rates, but these days it's hardly enough to cover rising fuel prices. So cars are ancient and un a bad state of repair, drivers often trick foreigners. A colleague was even robbed by one. Uber is much more expensive but much safer (and still cheap by western standards).
They're usually a bit more expensive here than a taxi. It can be beneficial because sometimes they have deals, and I sometimes take one when I have to book it in advance or when I'm afraid there will be delays with a corrsponding high cost. Though Uber tend to hit me with congestion charges then too. At least with a taxi I can ask them to take a different route. The problem with the uber drivers is that they don't know any of the street names here, they just follow the app's navigation. Whereas taxi drivers tend to be much more aware and know the streets and often come up with suggestions.
This also means that they sometimes fleece tourists but when they figure you know the city well they don't dare :) Often if they take one wrong turn I make a scene about frowning and looking out of the window and then they quickly get back on track. Of course that's another usecase where uber would be better, if you don't know the city you're in.
yeah thanks no, I'm paying for an Uber. For all the complaints over Ubers business practices, it's hard not to forget how bad taxis were. Regulatory capture is a clear failure mode of capitalism and the free market and that is no more shown than by the taxis cab industry.
Taxis aren't so bad in most countries. Here in Spain they are plentiful and fine. The same in most other countries I've been to. Only in the Netherlands they are horrible, they are ridiculously expensive because they all drive Mercedeses. As a result nobody uses them because they can't afford them. They're more like a limousine service, not like real taxis.
One time I told one of my Dutch friends I often take a cab to work here in Spain when I'm running late. He thought i was being pompous and showy. But here it's super normal.
Uber (Or cabify which is a local clone and much more popular) here on the other hand is terrible if you don't book it in advance. When I'm standing here on the street it takes 7-10 minutes for them to arrive while I see several taxis passing every minute. So there is just no point. Probably a factor of being unpopular too so the density is low.
I also prefer my money to end up with local people instead of a huge American corporation.
I think Uber in the US is a very different beast. But also because the outlook on life is so different there. I recently agreed with an American visitor that we'd go somewhere and we agreed to go by public transport. When I got there he wanted to get an Uber :') Here in Europe public transport is a very different thing. In many cases the metro is even faster than getting a taxi.
PS: What bothers me the most about Uber and Cabify is that they "estimate" that it will take 2 minutes to get a car to you, and then when I try and book one I get a driver that's 10 minutes away :( :( Then I cancel the trip and the drivers are pissed off. I had one time where I got the same driver I cancelled on earlier and he complained a lot even though I cancelled within 10 seconds when I saw how far away he was.
Anyway I have very few good experiences with these services, I only use them to go to the airport now when I can book it in advance. And never Uber anymore, only Cabify.
> Anyway I have very few good experiences with these services
For me, and a majority where I live, this is applicable to taxis. Which were known for being dirty, late, expensive, prone to attempting to rip you off, if they turned up at all, etc.
Outside of surge charging (in which they are more expensive) ubers are by and large either cheaper, or the same price. With the difference being that 99% of the time if you request one, its going to turn up. And when it does turn up, you know what your going to pay, not have them take a wrong turn at some point and by "mistake" and decide to charge you double. Or tell you they take card and then start making claims about how suddenly they can't etc.
Sounds like europe gets the bad end of the stick in this regard.
Yeah here in Spain the taxis are great. They're plentiful, cheap and efficient. The city is kinda a mess and the rideshare drivers have to drive a route mapped out by the app which often is not optimal. The real taxis know the city well. I think this is why the rideshares are unpopular and thus there's not many of them leading to the long waiting times. They're also spread between different providers, Uber is popular with the tourists only and the locals mostly use Cabify (a local company).
However in Romania on the other hand many taxi drivers are scammers or even criminals (one of my colleagues was robbed by one of them). It's also because the maximum taxi fares are too low to actually make a wage so I can kinda understand so I always tip really well (like double the fare or more which is still nothing). Though if they try to scam me they don't get a cent of course.
But not profitable yet.