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Comment by xutopia | Hacker News Reader

But as the article suggests it's not making it profitable.

I was around in 1999 when we had this conversation the first time. People openly mocked Google for throwing money down the well. It was a search engine! People Clicked away from Google. They were fools, it was unsustainable, etc etc. Then adwords launched and we know the rest of that story.

> Then adwords launched and we know the rest of that story.

I guess the moral of that story is that OpenAI may be profitable once they start injecting Temu ads into ChatGPT responses. Profitability, but at what cost?

They appear to already be working on something along those lines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41658837

Then you also remember all the other companies that threw money down the well in '99 and didn't pull a rabbit out of their hats in time.

Throwing money away isn't the clever bit in the Google story.

Google did become more an more of a portal though offering weather etc. to keep you from clicking away. Carasols of their own YouTube property videos at the top of each result. Amp links similar to AOL keywords running their own ads inside most of the time, etc.

You say this but Google has far better retention than openAI does.

Or you could cite the thousands of companies that died with a whispers

It’s called Survivorship bias

You're talking about the dotcom bubble! A time in history where enormous amounts of money were thrown down enormous amounts of overhyped wells, and almost all of them turned out to be stupidly bad business.

People mocking that waste of money were 99% right, and Google is one of the very few exceptions.

Early stage companies care more about growth than profitability.

Looking at this arbitrary chart from a quick search[1], OpenAI is likely still at the "young growth" stage

[1] https://vlp.teju-finance.com/courses/pluginfile.php/1844/mod...

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