Comment by Gigachad
13 hours ago
Only until the music stops. Racing to give away the most stuff for free can only last so long. Eventually you run out of other people’s money.
13 hours ago
Only until the music stops. Racing to give away the most stuff for free can only last so long. Eventually you run out of other people’s money.
Uber managed to make it work for quite a while
They did, but Uber is no longer cheap [1]. Is the parent’s point that it can’t last forever? For Uber it lasted long enough to drive most of the competition away.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/25/second-st...
Uber's in a business where you have some amount of network effect - you need both drivers available using your app, as well as customers hailing rides. Without a sufficient quantity of either, you can't really turn a profit.
LLM providers don't, really. As far as I can tell, their moat is the ability to train a model, and possessing the hardware to run it. Also, open-weight models provide a floor for model training. I think their big bet is that gathering user-data from interactions with the LLM will be so valuable that it results in substantially-better models, but I'm not sure that's the case.
Uber's genius was getting their workers (sorry, 'contractors') to carry the capital costs of providing the fleet of vehicles they use.