You are not actually considering the scale of 20 billion dollars nor the jump in a single year. Those are bad things.
The actual economics behind LLMs shows us they cannot become profitable ever, and this “invest more before becoming profitable” story does not fit in part because of that. Other companies who used that model had a way to become profitable.
The difference being they had a plan to monetize YouTube which offset the operating costs and even could make a profit, in addition to the stuff they over invested in having long term benefits. Aka they roughly could spent a lot to save money later off of what they built.
LLMs are not the same. They cost a shitload of money to run. Actual token based usage without being subsidized by investors would make any LLM cost users so much money that the actual value of it would immediately become major problem. Sure one can, currently, get decent code output by using hundreds or thousands of tokens, or using multiple LLMs / loops, or having agents go burn however many on iteration! But if we paid actual costs this shit would rapidly be shut down.
The AI infrastructure is also not saving money long term. Training is unbelievably expensive. Compute costs are all about gigantic data servers with video cards running, and the economics of all that is way tighter than anyone gives credit for. Those cards last like 3 years. The cooling costs are crazy. You have to have constant use to be efficient. None of these things are able to be covered by AI economics nor does it even make sense to be.
It costs too much, it’s just being covered by your money being pissed away by tech investors for a technology that cannot survive.
What did you get?
Uh oh!!! Uh oh uh oh uh oh uh oh
This has been stated since ChatGPT was released and has not happened. The video cards released specifically for LLM usage do not benchmark particularly better than the previous generation. And it’s still unbelievably expensive to run these cards and maintain the facility and, again, you only get like 3 or 5 years out of them! That’s a crazy investment lol