They are only great right now because, unlike web search, results are not yet sufficiently gamed and monetized.

There was a time, in an age long gone, when a cursory web search was great for product research too.

When you use Google you are generally actively looking for something. When you use Facebook you get ads for things you aren't looking for.

> When you used google 10x a day, you saw, at a minimum, 20 ads/day. How many ads are you seeing when you babble all day long with a chatbot?

There is also way more competition between chatbots than there was between search engines after Google started leaning into ads. Which strengthens the Khan-Esayas hypothesisis "that data privacy constitutes a key parameter of non-price competition in the market for" consumer tech [1][2].

[1] https://yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.pdf

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327111419_Privacy_a...

> How many ads are you seeing when you babble all day long with a chatbot?

You wouldn't see any of them, because you'd not be aware of the invisible bidding war over which products the bot recommends.

> When you used google 10x a day, you saw, at a minimum, 20 ads/day

That's assuming a user with no ad-blocker which is an ever diminishing number of users

The same kind of speculation questioned whether Facebook would ever have a significant business. Before that, the same was asked about Google's business.

If GPT can maintain or grow usage, the ad dollars will be there given the enormous scale. There is a hundred billion dollars plus worth of advertising waiting in the LLM space. It would be surprising if Facebook doesn't contract for example, losing ground to LLMs on advertising over the coming decade.

> as they don't seem as popular as search engines.

Anecdotal evidence that I observe is that people stopped using google and only ask LLMs nowadays for their everyday queries.

LLMs don't seem as popular as search engines? We are all living in our own bubbles, so I'll tell you about mine. In mine, LLMs have replaced search engines. Not just the query itself, but how it's used. I don't use Google to find a site that tells me what to do after I've spilled some red wine kny the carpet, I use ChatGPT to tell me directly what to do about it. That's foundational.

Founding a start-up with VC money, dumping the bag into someone else's lap, and then riding off into the sunset is a very different skill set from actually growing and running a company that is no longer early stage.

Look at Zuckerberg. He may have been good as a founder, but if he didn't have super voting shares, and if Meta's cash flow from their ad business wouldn't mask how poor his strategic decision making has been, he would have been pushed out as CEO years ago.

What’s the business? If it’s anything other than raising equity then you didn’t answer the question.

But how many companies did he actually launched? lol

The only actual product was "Loopt", some bs location sharing app that nobody used or ever heard about.

Or they stay private and raise more capital. Until they have a failed round people predicting bankruptcy are getting way ahead of how this would actually play out. Some of us are old enough to remember the "Amazon can never make a profit and will go bankrupt" predictions of 25 years ago.

There's a very low chance of OpenAI doing an IPO this year: https://polymarket.com/event/openai-ipo-by. So the assumption that they "have to do an IPO" already seems questionable. The rest of the analysis also feels pretty hand-wavy. I'm not saying OpenAI is in a strong financial position, but this article doesn't make a solid enough case for why it's supposedly in such dire straits.

Any particular preparations to do before this ship hits the sand?

"It means that OpenAI could soon rack up losses that exceed its asset value. In other words, they are on course to slam into bankruptcy this year."

...that's not how bankruptcy happens. What is this guy's background?

Assets on a balance sheet are held at book value. You can absolutely run GAAP losses that exceed net assets without running into bankruptcy, particularly if you're granting (and having employees exercise) options.

The critical measures are cash in and out and debt-like obligations. None of those metrics point to OpenAI going bankrupt this year unless they do something really fucking creative. (Which, to be clear, is Altman's M.O.)

True, but the current state of advertising is, charitably, kinda goofy.

I'm not surprised the iteration we're seeing now is perceived as failing: on the few remaining screens where ads are still present for me, they're between highly irrelevant to flat out repulsive. There are a few brands I will never touch with a long stick, purely as a result of their disturbing, disgusting ads -- again, charitably, a negative-sum game.

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