Did he win the lottery though? There's a lot of MRR, but I didn't see anything about profit. He could be losing money.

You're right that this stuff isn't cheap. I'm running https://Docalysis.com/ (a chat with files website) which has expenses growing every month, so you need to make sure your price is above what it costs you, and can't give everything away for free.

His product gives you a few thousand tokens for free, then makes you add your own OpenAI API key after that, so that he isn't paying for the chat responses from then on.

How does Docalysis.com work? I'm presuming you take the user input then search the documents for matching words to get snippets then add the snippets to a prompt (along with the original query) you send to an LLM.

What does the cost look like? Are you running your own llama.cpp or just using the ChatGPT API?

He did mention towards the end of the interview that he made some money. Doesn't specify how much though.

A lot of the ai plays seems like small vertical business opportunities that fill a particular niche that could be quickly profitable for a small team, but aren't really scalable or could quickly become obsolete.

A lot of successful SaaSes are this way. Niches are things that other people might not have solved already, and big players may not even want to bother solving. If you're happy with not eating the world, you can make a good business in a niche

but this is 'doable' or reproducible; guessing correct numbers by chance is not. Even though there is some luck involved, this is more of a skill than just pure guessing.

How on earth is this "winning the lottery"? Sure, there is an element of luck involved, but this is quite clearly a translation of work/sweat equity + understanding technology + exectution.

The opposite of a lottery.

> wins the lottery

> Congrats to him for being prepared to seize on an opportunity and executing well.

Those two statements seem incongruent.

Being prepared to seize on an opportunity and execute well is necessary, but not sufficient. There's still a whole lot of luck involved.