Seeing more and more people leave great big tech jobs or very smart new grads start AI companies that seem to hit $10m, $50m, $100m ARR incredibly quickly. What’s actually going on inside these companies? Are they…

5 points•d675•7 days ago•9 comments•
Seeing more and more people leave great big tech jobs or very smart new grads start AI companies that seem to hit $10m, $50m, $100m ARR incredibly quickly.

What’s actually going on inside these companies?

Are they profitable? How much are they burning? Are they really growing that fast? And are founders/employees building for the long term or basically aiming for an acquisition?

Would be interested to hear from anyone who’s worked at one of these companies.

Does it give you FOMO?

I'm starting as SRE @FAANG soon as a career switcher so that's cool in a brand new low level domain in storage. Out of my depth again given lack of knowledge but makes me wonder if a lot of these AI companies will have better outcomes.

9 comments

lucfranken7 days ago
It's really hard to see anymore where the real money is made and what is a big facade. As it's really simple now to create a huge facade. Before it needed more work to show something big which was actually small. But now you can generate the show.

And there are actually some which are really big. But there are so many more overflowing the world with non existing businesses that it's hard to decipher what is real and what is not. It also makes learning from the successful ones way harder.

thiago_fm6 days ago
This will go on until the AI CAPEX starts to drain. But there's a chance that this never happens.

All that money being spent on NVidia GPUs has to become tokens which will be bought by a business.

Many of those AI businesses are making those LLMs do something useful, which makes sense.

But right now nobody has an idea how much a single token really costs.

Once the CAPEX has to start showing some real cashflow positive numbers, it's likely that the token prices will go up, margins will compress and a lot of businesses will go bankrupt.

Of course, if this even stops. We could keep going on forever if AGI/ASI arrives, then all our previous ideas about economics which is based on human labour mostly is outdated, and we will need to figure out new economics!

skyberrys5 days ago
Do you think token cost will eventually tie into electricity prices? I know the GPUs cost money to buy but over the lifetime use cycle, isn't the bigger cost powering the GPU for all the tokens?

Eventually the value of the tokens will need to be higher than the cost to produce them.

taurath6 days ago
What’s happening is everyone is successful beyond their wildest dreams when raising the next round, and it used to be that you might find out more on exit but that’s getting more rare.

Now it’s a competition to be more manic than your competitors, and everyone has a gun out to shoot anyone who breaks the illusion of unlimited growth and unimaginable wealth

edimaudo6 days ago
Those are astronomical figures to be honest. Unless someone shows you their books, skepticism should be the default
AznHisoka6 days ago
No it does not give me FOMO. These stories are the most vocal. You never hear about the failures or the zombies

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

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