They paid about $10B on inference and had about $10B in revenue in 2025. The users and numbers of zeroes on those numbers are not relevant. What is relevant is the ratio of those numbers. They apparently are not even profitable on inference, wich is the cheap part of the whole business.
And cost of inference tripled from $3B in 2024 to $10B in 2025, so cost of revenue linearly grows with number of users, i.e. it does not get cheaper.
Of course they bundle R&D with inference pricing, how else could you the recoup that investment.
The interesting question is: In what scenario do you see any of the players as being able to stop spending ungodly amounts for R&D and hardware without losing out to the competitors?
But only if you ignore all the other market participants, right? How can we ever reach a point where all the i.e. smaller Chinese competitors perpetually trailing behind SOTA with a ~9 month lag but at a tiny fraction of the cost stop existing?
I mean we just have to look at old discussions about Uber for the exact same arguments. Uber, after all these years, still is at a negative 10 % lifetime ROI , and that company doesn't even have to meaningfully invest in hardware.
IMO this will probably develop like the railroad boom in the first half of the 19th century: All the AI-only first movers like OpenAI and Anthropic will go bust, just like most railroad companies who laid the tracks, because they can't escape the training treadmill. But the tech itself will stay, and even become a meaningful productivity booster over the next decades.
I am also thinking long term where is the moat if it will inevitably lead to price competition? Like it's not a Microsoft product suite that your whole company is tied in multiple ways. LLMs can be quite easily swapped to another.
> there was a single brain region where we saw that higher cannabis use was actually associated with lower brain volume – the posterior cingulate, which is part of the limbic system and is implicated in processes like memory, learning, and emotion. That said, some research suggests smaller posterior cingulate volume is actually associated with better working memory, so it’s a little unclear what this means.
> The best large-scale work I’ve seen finds the average association between overall screen/social-media use and teen well-being is tiny
Can you share the source? The last time I looked the association was both clear and pretty strong, e.g. "There was a linear dose–response association of TSSM and risk of depression. The risk of depression increased by 13% (OR = 1.13, 95%CI: 1.09 to 1.17, p < 0.001) for each hour increase in social media use in adolescents." DOI:10.3390/ijerph19095164
> “Social media” lumps together very different things
HN does this, but the research is usually pretty clear in spelling out they mean FB, Insta, TikTok and so on.
> If you want a lever that actually changes incentives, go after business model & design
I too would like changes in that direction (mostly because adults are also affected negatively by social media), but keep in mind even a non-optimized, strictly chronological feed produces these negative effects, see keyword (and associated studies for) "upward social comparison", i.e. people are always more inclined to post about things that went well or are fun, and thus even a pure chronologically sorted feed produces a warped perception of normal social reality.
Thanks for the reply, will look into the links. And yes, full agreement, algorithmic ranking is a whole different dynamic, and has to be both researched and regulated differently than a dumb feed. Even the latter probably has levers moderating human reception, i.e. if we evolved in communities of less than 150 individuals, being able to routinely follow the curated lives of e.g. 500 people probobly has other effects than a feed of 50 actual RL friends.
People in the US need to become more aware of the dramatic impact this current administration has on the world. A paper in the Lancet, not exactly your average leftie rag, extrapolates the deaths resulting from the sudden USAID defunding to amount to about 14 million people. That's about 10x Pol Pot.
People around the world distancing themselves from these actions is hardly nationalism.
I'm sorry, my cognitive bias says 'Look! See! That proves my point at how great the US is/was.'
1 bad politician elected by a fraction of the population is enough to turn the world against us. Why bother with such altruism when a single election can turn everyone against us?
But it's not just one politician or just one election. The current guy was elected twice. His position on tariffs, NATO, and Greenland are not new. The movement supporting him is unlikely to disappear any time soon. From the outside, it doesn't look like one wrong step, but just part of the new normal.
It's also important to understand that those on the receiving end of the threats are not taking them lightly. No one's laughing. It's easy to understand the change in behaviour if you understand this.
Back to the European Alternatives stuff, I've been looking at the services I use and which ones might become unavailable if, let's say, the US takes Greenland. It has nothing to do with nationalism, I just don't want to be caught with my pants down.
It was a single election in 2016, and a few governors and senators and… oh it’s actually a pattern, a system that people feign to ignore when convenient for them.
> 1 bad politician elected by a fraction of the population is enough to turn the world against us. Why bother with such altruism when a single election can turn everyone against us?
I get your pain but are you expecting other countries just to take hit?
Should EU lift sanctions with Russia as well? You know "1 bad politician elected by a fraction of the population".
Farming already is heavily subsidized in every EU country. The whole sector only exists as is precisely because of the fears you point out. And that is perfectly fine, because statistically speaking it already is a rounding error both in share of employment and share of GDP (1.2% of EU GDP), only kept alive for the exact purpose you talk about.
So even if these lobby talking points would be true, and everything had to be 100% subsidized, that wouldn't be a problem.
But is that really true, i.e. were you able to find actual facts supporting this? I'm asking because in Germany there are similar talking points driven by the farmer's associations (actually just the big agro corps, actual small-scale farmers don't have much of a voice in these) and everytime I tried to dig into a particular topic, it didn't seem to be supported by actual facts.
Who controls it though? A lot of non-compliant products are imported from China in plain sight, as there are 0 control and LATAM countries have no incentives in enforcing it.
Local producers follow the rules, dot theit i and cross their t, because it's more profitable to sell the premium parts of the cow to Europe and the rest in the local market.
There are controls here and also when it arrives to Europe.
Most of the cheaper honey you can buy in the EU is imported from China, and is fake, made from glucose syrup. The EU has tried to "regulate", but chinese producers don't care, no one except consumer groups and beekeeper unions pay for tests.
Maybe in ten years, when most EU beekeepers will have thrown the towel and moved to other occupations, the EU will act and forbid imports. But until then, well eat overpriced glucose syrup.
If fraud as blatant and old is tolerated, what do you think happens with meat, where controls are much harder if not impossible when dealing with things such as animal wellness?
Yep that is more and more the problem. Regulations are made "for show". Governments don't check them, don't enforce them (except extremely selectively), and companies are learning to just ignore them. But it's not just a problem for imports.
(note that the EU has already perfected this, as it is now basically standard for EU legislation to have rules about enforcement that always boil down to only allowing the EU commission to enforce legislation, or not enforce it. In other words: you, and even local governments, cannot use the courts to get compliance)
1) activists and lobbyists get what they want ... or they think so
2) governments get the votes they need without destroying the economy because political parties can lie about their "achievements"
3) companies (farms, what remains of industry) get what they want
Of course this will lead to a total disaster, sooner or later. Probably sooner. One where millions of lives will be very negatively affected.
Free trade is making this worse. Of course, China has always done this. In China, the law doesn't matter, only what the party says at the moment does. And even that is assuming there is zero truth to the constant claims that China encourages fake medicine production and even drug production for export.
In the US, this is now more and more the case as well. For example, xAI simply totally violated environmental laws (among others [1]) to get their datacenter operational and operating at all. Which, of course, really pushes their competition to do the same. The punishment? "Never do it again". Of course, it is essentially inconceivable that they're complying with the ruling (the datacenter is currently running and has not received extra grid power. In other words: the illegal generators are running right now despite the ruling, not only that but the second datacenter also has at least 45 illegal generators)
Food safety is ensured by controlling at the production level, with physical inspections. Given the sheer amount of food traded and imported the lab measures are very unreliable and costly.
Private consumer protection groups very often find problematic products. Honey is a good example, massive fake honey from China has been being dumped in the EU for the last 20 years, authorities don't care at all and allow it to continue.
Yes, the EU complained and regulated it in 2021[1], 2023[2], and nothing has been solved[3] since we don't control the imports nor ban them when importers don't act to reduce fraud and there is no enforcement when fraud happens.
Well yesterday he already imposed tariffs on several EU countries because they oppose the annexation of Greenland, so I wouldn't be surprised if he does the same in this case.
And cost of inference tripled from $3B in 2024 to $10B in 2025, so cost of revenue linearly grows with number of users, i.e. it does not get cheaper.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/