I don't understand these posts. Do people not understand how venture capital works?

The majority of these companies know they are burning money, but more than that knew they would be losing money at this point and beyond. That is the play, the thesis is: AI will dominate nearly everything in the near future, the play is to own a piece of that. Investors are willing to risk their investment for a chance of getting a piece of the pie.

Posts that flail around yelling companies 'losing money', without addressing the central premise are just wasting words.

In short, do you think AI is not going to dominate nearly everything? Great, talk about that. If you do believe is, then talk about something other than the completely reasonable and expected state of investors and companies fighting for a piece of the pie.

As a somewhat related tangent, people seem to not understand the likely cost trajectory of model training/inference costs:

* Models will reach a 'good enough' point where further training will be mostly focused on adding recent data. (For specific market segments, not saying that we'll have a universal model anytime soon, but we'll soon have one that is 'good enough' at c++, might already be there).

* Model architecture and infrastructure will improve and adapt. I work for a company that was among the first use deep learning to control real-time kinetic processes in production scenarios, our first production hardware was a nvidia Jetson, we had a 200ms time budget for inference, and our first model took over 2000! We released our product, running under 200ms, *using the same hardware* the only difference was improvements in the cuDNN library and some other drive updates and some domain specific improves on our YOLO implementation. Long story short, yes inference costs are huge, but they are also massively disruptable.

* Hardware will adapt. Nvidia cash machine will continue, right now nvidia hardware is optimized for balance between training and inference, where TPUs, the newer ones are more tilted towards inference. I would be surprized if other hardware companies don't force Nvidia to give the more inference based solution and 2-3x cost savings at time point in the next 5 years. And for all I know, perhaps a hardware startup will disrupt Nvidia, it would be one of the most lucrative hardware plays on the planet.

Focusing inference cost is a deadend to understanding the trajectory of AI, understanding the *capability* of AI is the answer to understanding it's place in the future.