LLM usage is still gaining traction. OpenAI may not be on top anymore, but they still have useful services, and they aren’t going under anytime soon.

And time spent dealing with laws and regulations may decrease efficiency, leading to increased power consumption, resulting in greater water usage in datacenters for cooling and more greenhouse gas emissions.

>And time spent dealing with laws and regulations may decrease efficiency, leading to increased power consumption, resulting in greater water usage in datacenters for cooling and more greenhouse gas emissions.

They don't care about that if they get a regulatory moat around them.

There’s only so much of that you can do without it becoming a problem you have to deal with. There is a limited supply of water in any area of the earth.

Maybe buying up all the water rights so nobody can use it to cool their own server farm is the literal moat that would serve them best.

They should hook up with Nestle.

If they’re not making money[1], and competitors are, or competitors are able to run at a negative for longer, then things could definitely wrap up for them quickly. To most consumers, LLMs will be a feature (of Google/Bing/X/Meta/OS), not a product itself.

[1] https://www.itpro.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/peo...

I remember for years people on HN said Uber would never work as a profitable business because it spent a lot of VC money earlier on without having enough revenue to cover it all. It's been around for 16yrs now despite running in the black until 2023.

uber is like a fine wine. it will appreciate and pay dividends until it bursts when waymo et. al. take over the streets in 20 years

Waymo has ~1000 cars. Uber has 8 million drivers. Worst case Uber will be acquired or merger or make a deal with one of the many AI driving startups.

I predict Waymo will have their own struggles with profitability. Last I heard the LIDAR kit they put on cars costs more than the car. So they'll have to mass produce + maintain some fancy electronics on a million+ cars.

FYI: s/running in the black/running in the red/

[0] https://languagesystems.edu/history-of-idioms-to-be-in-black...

Do you remember when people also thought rabbit would be a revolutionary AI device?

> To most consumers, LLMs will be a feature (of Google/Bing/X/Meta/OS), not a product itself.

OpenAI rejected a 97.4B USD buyout in February 2025 and won’t be absorbed anytime soon: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/technology/openai-elon-mu...

Don't worry; they'll have plenty of time to regret that.

There's a reason they're sweating the data issue. As much as it sucks to say it, Google/Bing/Meta/etc. all have a shitton of proprietary human-generated data they can work with, train on, fine tune with, etc. OpenAI _needs_ more human generated data desperately to keep going.

OpenAI has a gigantic moat.

No moat means Joe Anybody can compete with them. You just need billions in capital, a zillion GPUs, thousands of hyper skilled employees. You need to somehow get the attention of tens of millions of consumers (and then pull them away from the competition, ha).

Sure.

The same premise was endlessly floated about eg Uber and Google having no moats (Google was going to be killed by open search, Baidu, magic, whatever). These things are said by people that don't understand the comically vast cost of big infrastructure, branding, consumer lock-in (or consumer behavior in general), market momentum, the difficulty of raising enormous sums of capital, and so on.

Oh wait the skeptics say: what about DeepSeek. To scale and support that you're going to need what I described. What's the plan for supporting 100 million subscribers globally with a beast of an LLM that wants all the resources you can muster? Yeah, that's what I thought. Oh but wait, everyone is going to run a datacenter out of their home and operate their own local LLM, uhh nope. It's overwhelmingly staying in the cloud and it's going to cost far over a trillion dollars to power it globally over the next 20 years.

OpenAI has the same kind of moat that Google has, although their brand/reach/size obviously isn't on par at this point.

Microsoft is providing the compute, the capital, and if 365 Copilot takes off, also the consumers.

Microsoft has a mote. Oai does not.

365 is not taking off. Numbers are average at best. Most companies now pay 20/user/month extra, and whilst the sentiment is that it likely kina is somehow worth it, nobody claims it would be better than break even. Many users are deeply disappointed with the overpromising in powerpoint and excel. Sure it's quite useful in outlook and the assistant is great to find files in scattered sharepoints, but that's the limit of my value with it.

OpenAI copilot, not microsoft copilot, actually looks like a stronger product and they're going full force after the enterprise market as we speak. We're setting a demo in motion with them next month to give it a go.

We'll have to wait for the first one to crack Powerpoint, that'll be the gamechanger.