Comment by createful
17 days ago
Your end users are divided into multiple categories though.
AI spending is a bit like Pokemon games - most of your players are free to play, only earning you traffic and maybe some more players after recommending it to their friends - that's the average AI user. Around 5-10% of players pay a bit to the game - maybe to unlock some extra characters - those are the $20-$200 AI subscription users, with these you are not going to fund the whole business but it's some side cash. Then you have the 1℅, which spend massive amounts of money onto the game, and those are the ones primarily funding it - that's the business spending and where most of the money actually comes from.
You can only blame the average person for using the cloud service and recommending it to others.
I got sick of Pokemon's (Game Freak's, Nintendo's) exploitative practices back when they just tried to con you into buying two of every game. Anyway I don't know how bad pokemon is these days, but I think your analogy would make more sense if you thought about the AI companies like they're in a big hole in the ground. There's something down there, no doubt about it, but they don't know what it is or what to do with it, they just know that it loves munchin' down on cash. Sometimes Jensen Huang is down there and he also loves munchin' down on cash and if you don't feed him he gets mad and says he wasn't born a loser. OK, now forget about all the different users and enterprise customers because they're insignificant by orders of magnitude, a bit like how you focused on the whales in your analogy but we're zooming out further, until we can see the even bigger fish: the venture capital investors! They're the ones with the wheelbarrows of cash that they're tipping into the void.
Anyway, the only "whales" funding the AI companies is venture capital. The reason it's not a viable business (yet, so far, whatever) is because they spend more money than they make.