It’s things like the Reddit fiasco that got me thinking, can some of the biggest companies even be profitable ?
Without a doubt they provide a service, and they have users, but what if a lot of those users cannot be converted to customers ?
Uber, the plethora of food delivery apps, Reddit, Twitter etc.
Those companies seem to rely on cheap cash to subsidize their operations. But, can they turn their users into customers ?
Same things with the AI hype, sure chatGPT is good, and has a lot of potential, but will enough people pay $ to keep the GPUs running ?
Maybe I am in the frugal minority but I don’t pay for any of those services. Uber is the only one I take every so often, but if the prices went up I would switch to taxi without a second thought.
Reddit and Twitter (and almost all social media) don't provide a service valuable enough to get users to pay, so they rely on advertising. Uber does provide a service but prices it below cost to gain market share -- a strategy Amazon followed until they succeeded, but one which Uber probably won't.
You can find plenty of analysis and opinions about the affects of cheap cash and the growth-at-all-cost tech bubble questions, the topic gets hammered to death.
You can't trust ChatGPT et al to answer questions in a way that won't end in a lawsuit, and you can't make quantum computers do hardly anything.
Yet.
But the industry pretends this is all very worthwhile, even if in the end, technical mirages abound and we don't actually know if these things are useful.
I do want these to succeed, but we're so far away from them actually doing so that the ultra hype seems way too premature.
Any bubble around them now is a mirage that very well might evaporate.
The tech industry gets excited every few years. They're just a lot louder now than usual about it, because they desperately need to keep their shareholders happy.
Remember how exciting iPads were? Does anyone care now? Nobody talks about them anymore. They are still trying to make gigantic immersive 3D googles a thing, but the screen door effect, and motion sickness are probably not going to be solved any time soon. (Although I will defer to the mixed reality ones that at least keep your brain and your physical location reasonably intact.)
That can easily happen with the effort going into this over-promotion of late. They're trying to make any amount of money before the big crash.
Such stats become possible cuz advertisers who subsidize the whole mindless system, still make enough out of it.
So the question becomes - is there an upper bound to how much Advertisers globally can cough up?
As long as Global GDP keeps growing they probably can keep everything running. Post covid we are seeing what happens when Ad spends come down from a peak. Youtube/FB etc say drops in ad spend for the first time in their histories. Probably caused the layoffs in most of the freebie providing tech firms.
Second factor is how much Attention (that can be exploited) actually exists? Even if GDP keeps growing and ppl have disposable cash in hand, but ppls attention is so overloaded with info+spam then what happens? I haven't seen any great answers to that. But its obvious info overload is effecting people's ability to pay attention. Which effects the price of an ad.
Third factor is all the Spare Capacity built into the cloud to support actually paid services such Uber/Amazon/rest of corporate wonderland. Reddit, Twitter etc can handle such volumes purely because this excess capacity exists. Now if its diverted toward Crap-GPT et al and cloud prices rise for content mills things are going to get rough.
Fourth factor is the cost of handling private data security/privacy/spam/moderation/keeping ppl from exploiting each other seems to be growing. Currently the cost is showing up as govt fines and tomorrow in implementing random half baked govt regulations.
So you already have ppl selling books about the Subprime Attention crisis and predicting collapse. But even if the freebie/content providers/ad tech collapses the rest of tech - cloud - eCommerce - paid content/gaming etc is going to chug along just fine.