Well, so much for the revenues needed to justify those trillion dollar valuations, eh? At this rate, they'll be lucky to have a valuation of a billion bucks.

And, IMHO, that could be the best thing to happen to LLM companies. Send them back into the wilderness, where they can wander for a few more years until they develop an actual use case that justifies the costs.

While that's decidedly a pleasant thought, the fact is, unless they figure out a way to make a profit from their product, no amount of wilderness wandering will do anything to help them.

The reality is as they do it now, it can not make a profit in the environment in which they compete. The problem is, they compete. That's why they'd lower prices, to compete with lower-priced competitors. But lower prices don't necessarily move the needle when every fucking dog and it's sidekick in this dogfight are doing the same thing: Operating at an overall net loss.

So they're playing that "last man standing" game, milking out the revenue in tiny amounts trying to stay in business, if not actually solvent, and outlast the competition. Their BELIEF is that if they don't have competitors, then they'll be able to charge a hell of a lot more and actually make a profit for what they do.

Economically, they're not wrong in that belief. Realistically, though, the last man standing will face the wrath of the antitrust laws (assuming by then we have a functional government again, of course) and probably tons of legal garbage the rest dumped on them as they were bought out, and will probably have to continue operating at a loss to appease regulatory oversight. If regulatory oversight allows them a meager profit margin, and they raise prices to cover it, the odds still suggest they're not going to make enough money to avoid lawsuits and the fallout from the deaths of the other AI companies.

So there's really no path to profits even within a human lifetime. They owe trillions to investors, and investors TODAY are not very well known for their patience in getting returns. The only reason it's gone on this long is the shell game they play with funding. But the piper will be paid when that merry-go-round grinds to a halt, if not on all of them for failing, then on the last one standing for being the focus of investor rage.

The truly funny thing to me is that they know this. They're not stupid. But they are desperate. And that's proven by how often they collectively come out with a half-baked, poorly conceived new product or service every few days. They keep trying to grasp the brass ring, and so far, all they've grabbed is an iron anchor.