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Comment by vanuatu

4 days ago

Do you need a study for when a trading firm reports PnL? Likewise when labs report 80x growth?

There are applied AI cos making 100-400M+ in just a few years of incorporation, does that count as financial gain?

Academia is currently 6-12mo behind the frontier of the industry due to secrecy and publication times, so any "long term" study, even for a year, would be out of date on arrival

When we're talking lab revenue, we're taking what companies are spending on AI.

The question is not whether companies are investing in AI, it's whether they're getting anything in return. Or, whether execs are just as anxious and confused about the story being sold as everyone else, taking the ludicrous amount of capital being put behind it as evidence that there's a "there" there, and hopping on the train out of pure FOMO and hedging, whether they're actually getting anything out of it at all.

  • I think this is reasonable

    If we start to see spend go down because projects fail and companies run the ROI calculation and determine it's not worth it, then ill stand corrected and happily admit that

Why don't you list these AI companies, then?

  • can just ask chatgpt but off the top:

    code wrappers - cursor (special case), lovable, replit

    part model part applied - perplexity, 11labs, cartesia, suno

    applied branches of model labs - codex, claude code, deployment cos & fde teams

    ai roll ups - thrive, longlake, some stealth ones

    applied - cognition, sierra, fin, harvey, legora, glean

    part data part applied - scale

    Margins vary, but many of these companies' revenue are already a chunk higher than what was last publicly reported

    Wouldnt be surprising to see some of them 2-5x rev in the next few years