The immediate catalyst, it seems, is an intensifying focus on capex, or capital expenditures. Microsoft revealed that its spending surged 66% to $37.5 billion in the latest quarter, even as growth in its Azure cloud business cooled slightly. Even more concerning to analysts, however, was a new disclosure that approximately 45% of the company’s $625 billion in remaining performance obligations (RPO)—a key measure of future cloud contracts—is tied directly to OpenAI, the company revealed after reporting earnings Wednesday afternoon. (Microsoft is both a major investor in and a provider of cloud-computing services to OpenAI.)

  • anakin78z@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    “market reaction suggests that more capital isn’t going to be a viable substitute for a business model anymore.”

    Time to find the next vague thing that investors can pour trillions into without really knowing what it is or does.

    • Pringles@sopuli.xyz
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      6 hours ago

      It’ll be quantum computing. Since the last hype around it, a lot of progress has been made to the point that quantum computers are actually becoming useful, since error correction is now mostly resolved.

    • mrnobody@reddthat.com
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      8 hours ago

      Don’t forget, though, it does that one thing for that one reason I forgot already as I typed it… But its still good, clearly!

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      12 hours ago

      Since OpenAI just announced the possibility of bankruptcy, it’s definitely coming. It’s going to be wild for whichever idiot in charge at MS to go down in history as the man who ruined one of the most powerful and integral companies on earth.

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          11 hours ago

          They don’t have a product with any actual value or use cases. The ads aren’t going to reverse that. If it were that simple then they would have been able to make profit with their subscription model.

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            10 hours ago

            How would that even work as well? The ads will be in the website, doesn’t most stuff run through API calls? If you force everyone to start paying per call, the business model falls apart instantly.

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              6 hours ago

              API calls are already only paid, no?

              I’m guessing the ads will be embedded in the answers of the free users (like: it will add to the prompt something like “and don’t forget to plug the sponsor, ridge wallet”)

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                3 hours ago

                Oh actually are they? I admit I assumed they were doing the standard bullshit of everything is free to get you integrated, then they start charging. Actually maybe that already happened and this is the result of that.

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            10 hours ago

            I think we’re quite a long way off before they actually crash and burn, if they ever do. We have no idea how much money the ads will inject and they also receive significant government contracts and will probably get a lot more going forward

            If the market can pretend Tesla is worth so much i think it can easily sustain AI for many years

            • krashmo@lemmy.world
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              10 hours ago

              It’s already been several years. Tesla had an actual product that people wanted. Yes, they’ve been doing their best of late to torpedo their market share and brand name but at one point they were doing what they set out to do. Open AI has never done what they said they would do.

              • gustofwind@lemmy.world
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                10 hours ago

                Kinda but also not entirely. I know a lot of people who use ChatGPT and other AIs at work and it does basically exactly what they want and just gets better

                I’m not a proponent but the naysayer doomers are almost as wrong as the tech evangelists

                Is it overvalued? Sure

                Is it worthless? Absolutely not

                • krashmo@lemmy.world
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                  10 hours ago

                  That’s cool. I have yet to find a use case for AI. Am I doing it wrong or are they just bad with computers?

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      12 hours ago

      Doubt that’ll happen for a few mor years unfortunately. I can’t imagine most of the hardware made for AI datacenters is compatible with consumer stuff :/

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        48 minutes ago

        Yep the good times are over for now.

        And even if, it might turn into a black hole for an agonizingly long time.

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        8 hours ago

        A lot of it hasn’t actually been made, though. The AI companies have put in orders for future production. That future capacity can be redirected with a wave of a pen.

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    14 hours ago

    The real lesson here is that if you are a company that was founded on stupid imaginary bullshit your investors are comfortable with investing in stupid imaginary bullshit and it isn’t going to hurt your price.

    When you are a legacy tech company whose investors expect you to actually make products that you sell for money, they don’t like to hear that blew every penny you had on fucking magic beans.

  • Optional@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    OpenAI has made about $1.4 trillion in commitments to procure both the energy and compute it needs to fuel its operations. But its revenue barely crossed $20 billion in 2025.

    Investors are increasingly critical of what they describe as “circular” deals involving the industry’s biggest players. On Wednesday evening, The Information reported that OpenAI is seeking a fresh $60 billion in funding from heavyweights like Nvidia and Amazon. However, market reaction suggests that more capital isn’t going to be a viable substitute for a business model anymore. “Maybe Oracle stock got way ahead of fundamentals, and now the market’s saying, ‘All right, show me, I want to see it,’” Eric Diton, president of the Wealth Alliance, told**Yahoo Finance.

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      7 hours ago

      Thanks for sharing, really insightful.

      In my personal opinion after being also responsible in AI for our company, I do not see how it will be profitable for them.

      For example Microsoft Copilot license, costs 30$/month, but a lot of things I can do with it a free Chatbot can do too.

      It definitely has it strengths and use cases and I am sure it will not go away. But it is not the way the market it as a full AI, it just generates answers with the highest probability. I cannot see it developing from there to the real AI.

      I think this year will be really interesting to watch all the AI companies, especially Oracle as they have to refinance a lot. If one falls it will send them into to a spiral, the big companies will be fine, but I am sure they will cut their funding of OpenAI.

      But who knows could be the other way around and OpenAI finds anything new to make them more profitable.

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      7 hours ago

      The gig was up for me when I tried to get it to play dungeon master in a game of DnD. It would start out great, but eventually it would forget what we were doing and instead of giving me choices it started just telling me the story of me playing dnd and it would stop giving me options. This would happen about 6 minutes into playing, or 3 or 4 “turns”, and that’s when I realized the incredible memory sync it is if it can’t reference instructions given moments ago. A newer model won’t fix that.

      At the end of the day it’s complex predictive text that amounts to a Rorschach test.

      • Wispy2891@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        You need to do a custom program if you want to do that. I mean a traditional program where variables are stored properly.

        The models have no memory at all, at every question it starts from scratch, so the clients are just “pretending” it has a memory by simply including all previous questions and answers in your last query. You reply “ok”, but the model is getting thousands of words with all the history.

        Because each question becomes exponentially expensive, at some point it starts to prune old stuff. It either truncates the content (for example the completely useless meta ai chatbot that WhatsApp forced down the throat loses context after 2-3 questions) or it uses the model itself to have a condensed resume of past interactions, but this is how it hallucinates.

        Otherwise it will cost like $1 per question and more

        • Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip
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          6 hours ago

          Which kind of illustrates the fundamental flaw right? Videogame companies have spent decades creating replayable DnD esc experiences that are far more memory efficient and cost effective. They already kind of do it the best way. AI can assist, and things like the machine learning behind the behaviors of the NPCs in Arc Raiders for example is very cool, but as you said, you need a custom program… which is what a video game is, so I guess my point is I don’t see the appeal in re-inventing it through sort of automated reverse engineering.

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            4 hours ago

            LLMs could theoretically give a game a lot more flexibility, by responding dynamically to player actions and creating custom dialogue, etc. but, as you say, it would work best as a module within an existing framework.

            I bet some of the big game dev companies are already experimenting with this, and in a few years (maybe a decade considering how long it takes to develop a AAA title these days) we will see RPGs with NPCs you can actually chat with, which remain in-character, and respond to what you do. Of course that would probably mean API calls to the publisher’s server where the custom models are run, with all of the downsides that entails.

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    14 hours ago

    Wait.

    You mean that dedicating the majority of their business to buying things from themselves has not proven to be a sound strategy in the eyes of investors?

  • veee@lemmy.ca
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    13 hours ago

    Looks like that magic well of social permission is about to dry up.