I would like to try this. I have tried sqlite and duckdb, both got me started really quickly for an MVP, but then I quickly wished I had MVP’d with supabase because the step of backing up and productionizing was a lot of walking backwards. Maybe just me.
To add to the valid counterpoints in the existing replies, Amazon was cash flow positive for most of those 20 years, so they were investing their own money back into things that could generate even more revenue (and profit!) for the company.
OpenAI is still losing money much faster than it can make it and is planning to accelerate those losses indefinitely.
I think the most likely outcome is that it turns into something like Uber, where they continue to lose money waiting for a major technological leap (truly unassisted and reliable AI in this case, fully self-driving cars in the case of Uber) and then pivot a bit to a largely unnecessary and poorly executed business model that people reluctantly use for the most part (with some eager advocates) but makes some money.
You misunderstand the Amazon story. Amazon did two pre-IPO funding rounds: <1m angel round and an 8m Series A led by Kleiner Perkins. That's it. In contrast, OAI has raised almost 60 billion in 10 funding rounds, and if you RtFA you can see the estimates are they have to raise hundreds of billions more.
For the IPO itself Amazon sold 3 million shares at $18, for a raise of 54m (from the IPO alone they had enough cash to pay off every investor up to that point). In July 2001, in the heart of the dotcom crash, they raised 100m by selling equity to undisclosed investors, and of course they have been using shares as part of their compensation packages for a very long time, but that's about it for Amazon's entire equity raises.
They did raise 15b in a bond issuance a few weeks ago, their first bonds issued since 2022, with the money going to several things but mostly AI. However, since bond payoffs are very different from selling equity this is a very different play from what OAI is doing. Amazon will never pay more than a fixed amount for that money, capped upside to the bond-holders.
The reason this is different is that Amazon has largely run either a small profit or a small loss, quarter after quarter, because they take their profits and instead of recording it, putting it in a bank, or dividend-ing it to shareholders they put it into building datacenters and warehouses and software and the like. But because of that enormous cash generation they have only rarely tapped outside investors, either in bonds or equity markets. OAI is not generating near enough cash to fund their operations, so they have been selling equity in absolutely enormous quantities- they have already raised more cash pre-IPO than any company in history and outside estimates like this one from HSBC call for them to blow past the amount they've already raised. This is fundamentally very very different.
OpenAI doesn’t have a product? Have we existed in the same reality for the last 3 years? Something something fastest grown user base in the history of tech
No, they don't, the value of AI isn't the AI itself, it's purely the output.
If someone else can achieve the same output as OpenAI at a similar price, they are completely toast. There is absolutely nothing tying you to ChatGPT because ChatGPT doesn't matter, only what it produces.
Amazon was in a (similar) situation, but not quite, because they offered a unique experience. But I strongly believe that if Sears just kept their catalogue for another decade, Amazon would not exist.
Selling books online was certainly profitable, but I'm not sure about unique. Amazon's big success is that they had no particular ties to any existing publisher so they didn't have the corporate headwinds of "this will kill our brick and mortar stores and their distribution systems!".
And unlike taxi drivers / companies, these competitors have much deeper pockets.
It is not hard to imagine Google being able to outlast OpenAI for a decade and it is hard to imagine OpenAI being able to survive for more than another couple of years given that.
>In total, OpenAI aims to invest approximately $1.4 trillion in computing infrastructure – encompassing Google Cloud, Nvidia chips, and data center expansions.
Huh yeah fair. That's more than the yearly defense budget. Absurd.
Though I'm sure it's not _yearly_
The sovereign wealth funds and billionaires need something to do with all their available cash. It's no fun just watching the number increase anymore, that got boring quite a while ago.
Yes, while this is OSS, we haven't yet figured out how to self host an acquiring bank partnership... For now we're using Stripe Connect to set up a merchant account through our Stripe Connect platform. So as long as you are a legal entity (individual or business) in the countries that Stripe does merchant acquiring you should be good to go with us.
Eventually we want to get to a place where we are embedded deeper on the payments side. But for now that's the flow.
You still need to have a payment provider / merchant account, so that part remains the same
For all I could see this is no different than any other payment gateway service. Well, it is different in one important way: you'll pay a higher percentage per transaction, since the middle man needs to make money somehow.
With Flowglad you’d pay ever so slightly less than you would with a vanilla Stripe integration which usually includes Stripe Billing. That total cost is 3.6% (2.9% per charge + .7% for billing) and $.30, whereas we’re 3.55%.
We’re not really trying to compete on cost. But we certainly aren’t more expensive once you include the cost of Stripe Billing.
Unless expertly engineered (like the supabase MCP server is), CLI commands as skills are better most of the time. My skills are a script and a MD file on disk.
There were a lot of signs in America at one point in time that said "No Coloreds", "Colored Section", and similar phrases to indicate the spaces that white people had decided non-white people could or could not go.
At the same time, there were not a lot of signs saying "No Persons of Color" or "Persons of Color Section".
Likewise, my grandfather who died 35 years ago was very fond of saying "the coloreds". His use of the term did not indicate respect for non-white people.
Historical usage matters. They are not equivalent terms.
To who? Not to me, and I don't have a single black friend who likes "person of color" any more than "colored". What gives you the authority to make such pronouncements? Why are you the language police? This is a big nothing-burger. There are real issues to worry about, let's all get off the euphemism treadmill.
Wow HN so negative. I know yall are using ChatGPT or other chat app every day and would benefit from improvements in steerability, no matter your preferences.
I swear, one comment said something like “I guess normies like to talk to it - I just communicate directly in machine code with it.”
