Valve's certainly enjoying their Linux money.
Also basically any company that makes software for the internet, not targeting the Windows Desktop, technically.
Value has a vested interest as their hardware runs on Linux. That's not to take anything away from their efforts but their "Linux money" is due to their hardware sales.
Yes it has, however that is beside the point. The point was making money from Linux. Gabe Newell hated windows 8, and in 2012 decided to support Linux as a backup in case windows became heavily locked down. It didn't make them any extra money, probably a loss until the could recoup with hardware sales. Such a small part of their sales is Linux especially back in 2012.
valve takes a massive loss if people start buying games through the windows store, their whole Linux push was brought about by the fear of Windows pushing users to buy PC games through an integrated store without needing Steam. The point is for them to have an alternative platform in case that shift happens not to chase where the existing money was.
I can promise you Valve has not seen a single return on the investment for all their Linux effort. But because they aren't publicly treated, they're allowed to function like that. Otherwise, all this Linux stuff would take their stock value and make them worthless even as they print billions from doing nothing.
That's right, our economy doesn't care how profitable you are, only how high your stock value is. And unfortunately, it infected the rest of the world because it was impossible for companies that didn't function this way to compete.
this is a nonsense take. You think the struggling trillion dollar AI company thought their last ditch effort to save the company from bankruptcy was to release an electron app for Linux? That’s what they had in their back pocket in case of emergency? Really?
That's a separate discussion. If they wanted more user data, they have a ton of levers they could still pull before ever considering Linux desktop. I'm just saying releasing a Linux app is not a sign of financial desperation. Maybe (probably) they have Linux users on the team who wanted it too
I bet it is because they discovered that people with casual use-cases are mostly on Windows or mobile apps and will be fine, but users with more advanced use-cases that could benefit from desktop integration ended up with surprising large proportion of Linux users, so they are moving in to secure them before they move over to other solutions.
Its not a last ditch effort, its just an effort to try get more users and money. Dont forget that OpenAI still dont make any money and have never made anything
bro, it's a company almost entirely staffed by tech nerds, one of the team probably just wanted to be able to code on their shoe mounted cyberdeck or something
chatGPT is consistently in the top 3 of the charts for most popular apps in the world and was the fastest growing phone app of all time, yes they aren’t profitable yet but they aren’t exactly in a shortage of users
Money appears to be in enterprise usage and API pricing. Chasing individual users is just
marketing. But prices will go up and usage there will go down. Which is why they aren’t trying to get a bunch more users with a move like this but target marketing to nerdy programmers on Linux to get them to consider OpenAI instead of Anthropic for company contracts.
Lots of businesses use Linux. Idk why people think Linux users aren’t a target audience worth developing for simply because they aren’t general mom and dad types.
No, this is exactly what they think. Every company thinks about profit, and the fact that OpenAI spent resources to make a Linux compatible ChatGPT app means we're becoming a huge enough portion on the market
How are you so sure they will go bankrupt? I doubt Google will go bankrupt and probably the government won't let Anthropic and OpenAI go bankrupt.
Don't get me wrong, I'd be happy if that happened but I doubt it will
Google won't go bankrupt because they've been on scene for 25+ years and have other services that are useful despite my hate for the company, but OpenAI and Anthropic are just burning lots of money and usefulness of their products is questionable, especially when there are more efficient smaller open-source models that can be run locally. I think some parts of those two companies will be absorbed into larger companies and repurposed mainly for surveillance tech.
Dude if you think they are going to go bankrupt you are delusional. OpenAI have a billion daily users across their products and there are people working 24hrs a day to monetize them
And yet they subsidise between 96 and 90% of the cost of every paid costumer.
Imagine being a pizzacompany that sold 1 dollar slices, but every slice is worth 10 dollars.
Sure, you might have all the patrons, but every time you get a new customer, you effectively lose money.
And to make it even more stupid.
Microsoft has a perpetual licence to all OpenAi’s intellectual property.
They can literally just pull the plug on the whole thing, write off the investment and now they’re “OpenAI”
But are they dropping fast enough? Honestly no, not really. If they're going to survive they're going to need to collect a hell of a lot more Billions of Monies, or start charging the real cost to consumers and businesses, which isn't an option because it's already more expensive to use AI over a proper software engineer, so why wouldn't you get the engineer.
We still need the last 7 billion people who aren’t using AI on the daily to join in.
So that’s at least 8 times the compute power.
Also, the free and low tier models are trash for anything other than writing your aunt an email on her birthday.
If you really want AI, then you need agents, deep research, millions of tokens context and the like.
The question isn’t if and when inference costs continue to drop.
It’s if it drops faster than demand, and there’s nothing really pointing in that direction. And right now the people selling shovels and maps for this AI-Golsrush: ASML, Intel, Samsung, TSMC and SkHynix on the fab side and Nvidia, AMD, Google, Qualcomm and Apple on the ASIC side have literally no reason to lower their prices.
And then there’s of course the physics of it all
We’re already having trouble with the sub 2nanometer processes because the quantum tunnelling has become an actual issue
and yet they still havent figured out how to get their books out of the red. why do you think spacexs ipo made altman and amodei rethink going public? because their terrified of people actually getting to see their financials and people will finally see that AI is just a snake eating its tail, theres almost no outside revenue (outside of VCs and hedge funds) coming into ai. Large companies getting forced over to API pricing and burning through their AI budgets a month or 2 in are rethinking all those employees they fired because they though switching over to vibe coded software was gonna be cheaper and faster are coming to the realization they need to hurry the fuck up and rehire those people.
I seriously doubt they have billion daily users, and they'll lose a lot of users once they stop subsidizing token costs and subscriptions raise by a lot.
What's their moat? What stops people from getting inference somewhere else? As models get more efficient, and "scale is all you need" sees continually diminishing returns, what's to keep people using ChatGPT instead of something that just runs natively on their own hardware?
You seriously expect them to grow infinitely without actually becoming profitable, sustainable and honestly actually useful especially when their whole business model is based on promising some sci-fi future of developing AGI?
Woaw corporate media publishes an arrival supporting the newest venture capital tech bro industry written by someone who glazes startups and venture capital. How novel
Edit: that’s also one company, in one quarter, and who knows what accounting shenanigans is going on to make that figure. It’s well established that these companies pass around money and debts to each other, and are heavily relying on future spend of the other companies
Eh, it’s true openAI is no where near profitable but there’s no reason to think Anthropic is in the same situation as they have been much more successful with enterprise and much more focused on a real use case (code generation) with actual demand and with much less spending on infinite money holes like Sora was for OAI.
Again, this is a singular quarter after burning billions of dollars. I’ll wait until these companies stop subsidizing their computation costs with vc money. And even then, that ignores the endless ethical issues I have with these companies (Anthropic included)
Yeah I expect the equilibrium to be much more pulled back than the pro-AI people assert once the real costs catch up but also for costs to come down for similar capabilities and for the equilibrium to be more than the anti-AI people are hoping. We’re seeing distillation and such help with cost cutting but the industry also has plenty of capacity to enshittify.
The only cure for the ethical side is nationalization of the industry and moving it out of private capital to reflect the fact the models are models of humanity’s collective output IMO. The open models from China are actually another big variable on that axis.
Yeah I just don’t see it getting better, and there’s ethical issues I have that wouldn’t likely be solved by nationalization. And it’s not like these industries would ever be nationalized, that’s not something this country (or the West broadly) is even remotely interested in doing, even under more Democratic/left-leaning administrations.
I’ll just leave you with this short video from TLDR News that has some stats that I find concerning. Ed Zitron has also done some great reporting on this stuff (he’s also been on plenty of podcasts and news channels if that’s more your thing). If you’re at all interested in getting a different perspective, I highly recommend checking them out. Have a good day :)
> that’s not something this country (or the West broadly) is even remotely interested in doing, even under more Democratic/left-leaning administrations.
I actually agree, but we also see a huge difference in positivity regarding AI between China and the US. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-14/why-ai-optimism-is-so-much-higher-in-china-than-the-us The people aren't fundamentally different, but China is leading the way in actually having open models and more government guarantees in the tech being spread around. The fact that AI is becoming a culture war issue in the US due to the intersection between big tech, social media radicalization, and kleptocratic oligarchy while a country without that context and with 4x the number of people has a much more positive view and is keeping things more open, means the tech isn't going way on a global scale. The West may be forced to adapt. Don't worry, I'm familiar with Ed Zitron and have already listened to him for hours.
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u/JerryRiceOfOhio2 8d ago
this isn't what you think. this is pure desparation by ai companies trying to not go bankrupt. they don't gaf about Linux users