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A comment on The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles. Parent comment

Re:The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on b... by sandspar on Monday June 09, 2025 @01:51AM (#44221721)
I just don't understand how people can see "100 million signups in a week" and immediately dismiss it. We're not talking about fidget spinners. I don't get why this sentiment is so common here on HackerNews. It's become a running joke in other online spaces, "HackerNews commenters keep saying that AI is a nothingburger." It's just a groupthink thing I guess, a kneejerk response.
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Re:The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on b... by pintxo on Monday June 09, 2025 @02:24AM (#44221866)
I assume, when people dismiss it, they are not looking at it through the business lens and the 100m user signups KPI, but they are dismissing it on technical grounds, as an LLM is just a very big statistical database which seems incapable of solving problems beyond (impressive looking) text/image/video generation.
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Re:The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on b... by sandspar on Monday June 09, 2025 @02:45AM (#44221974)
Makes sense. Although I think that's an error. TikTok is "just" a video sharing site. Joe Rogan is "just" a podcaster. Dumb things that affect lots of people are important.
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Re:The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on b... by otabdeveloper4 on Monday June 09, 2025 @05:23AM (#44222680)
> We're not talking about fidget spinners.

We're talking about Hitler memes instead? I don't understand your feigned outrage.

The actual valid commercial use case for generative images hasn't been found yet. (No, making blog spam prettier is not a good use case.)

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Re:The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on b... by simonw on Monday June 09, 2025 @07:44AM (#44223462)
Everything Everywhere All At Once won a bunch of Oscars. They used generative AI tools for some of their post-production work (achieved by a tiny team), for example to help clean up the backgrounds in the scene with the silent dialog between the two rocks.
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Re:The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on b... by stavros on Monday June 09, 2025 @07:19AM (#44223303)
You're right, nothing has value unless someone figures out how to make money with it. Except OpenAI, apparently, because the fact that people buy ChatGPT to make images doesn't seem to count as a commercial use case.
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Re:The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on b... by otabdeveloper4 on Monday June 09, 2025 @08:11AM (#44223657)
OpenAI is not profitable and we don't know if it ever will be.
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Re:The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on b... by stavros on Monday June 09, 2025 @08:15AM (#44223693)
Have we shifted the goalposts from "something people will pay for" to "needs to be profitable even with massive R&D" then?
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Re:The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on b... by otabdeveloper4 on Monday June 09, 2025 @09:34AM (#44224366)
OpenAI is not "something people will pay for" at the moment though.
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Re:The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on b... by stavros on Monday June 09, 2025 @09:45AM (#44224474)
Except lots of people are paying for it. I'll refer you to the other post on the front page for the calculation that OpenAI would have to get just an extra $10/yr from their users to break even.
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Re:The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on b... by otabdeveloper4 on Monday June 09, 2025 @11:49AM (#44225701)
Your response reminds me of that joke about selling a dollar bill for ninety cents.
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Re:The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on b... by stavros on Monday June 09, 2025 @11:52AM (#44225731)
Your response makes me think we have different definitions for profitability.
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Re:The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on b... by dbdoskey on Wednesday June 11, 2025 @06:33AM (#44246111)
OpenAI is not profitable because it is spending resources into moving forward and training new models and creating new tools.
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