“So the Chinese labs have thrown a lifeline to the Western loss-making labs, and I just have no clue as to why.”
I don’t think it is intentional but this is actually quite bad for the western labs.
The entire booster narrative has been “look at how their revenue is growing! $10bn to $100bn ARR in under a year! This’ll be a multi-trillion IPO!” and the extrapolated future growth from $100bn to $500bn and $500bn to $1tn justified future investment… but that revenue was just because inference was expensive.
The revenue growth story is all that matters pre-IPO. If revenue falls from $100bn to $50bn that’s very very bad optics for OpenAI and Anthropic even if they are now profitable, it completely destroys the growth narrative.
I was about to say, one take I've heard is that the party ideology considers profit a kind of "rent" in a derogatory way, and consequently seeks to undermine the ability of western companies to collect large profit margins
reticulates · · focus · HN ↗
I don’t think it is intentional but this is actually quite bad for the western labs.
The entire booster narrative has been “look at how their revenue is growing! $10bn to $100bn ARR in under a year! This’ll be a multi-trillion IPO!” and the extrapolated future growth from $100bn to $500bn and $500bn to $1tn justified future investment… but that revenue was just because inference was expensive.
The revenue growth story is all that matters pre-IPO. If revenue falls from $100bn to $50bn that’s very very bad optics for OpenAI and Anthropic even if they are now profitable, it completely destroys the growth narrative.
Bjorkbat · · focus · HN ↗