Lots of comparisons to eg. Amazon, and how both were burning money for ages.

Maybe the better comparison is Uber? I.e. a commoditised product (taxis on an app), burning money to directly subsidise and gain market share. I always thought it was utterly insane and a waste of money... But you'd be hard pressed to have not made money on Uber.

This is my understanding anyway. A LLM-generated summary suggests that anyone who invested pre-IPO got at least 8-10% annually compounded. Even Series G investors made 2.3x since then. It's not an Eldorado and has to make up for all the losers in the VC portfolio but it's money made, not a smouldering crater of losses.

And after going public, return from IPO is 9.4% compounded. Price is 40% below all time high in October 25 but hey that's a harsh criterion for a long term investment.

The reason why I think it's a good point of comparison is that there's no moat, plenty of competition, heavily subsidised for years by literally burning cash, now seemingly profitable and a reasonably sane PE ratio of 17.

Of course one difference is that a major cost item for LLM companies is building genuinely new, cutting edge engineering/science products whereas for Uber, I never understood why they need the 1000s of technical staff to deliver a taxi app.

I don't know about the ins and outs of the business models of either LLM providers or Uber but keen to hear from people who have insights.