Building LLMs is probably not going be a brilliant business
December 6, 2024
In the 1960s, airlines were The Future. That is why old films have so many swish shots of airports in them. Airlines though, turned out to be an unavoidably rubbish business. I’ve flown on loads of airlines that have gone bust: Monarch, WOW Air, Thomas Cook, Flybmi, Zoom. And those are all busts from before coronavirus – times change but being an airline is always a bad idea.
Source: Building LLMs is probably not going be a brilliant business
I once read that in the entire history of commercial aviation, collectively airlines have not made a profit.
Sure, there are lots of profitable aspects of aviation–running privatised airports is one (essentially government granted rights to tax people are pretty good ‘businesses’) and aircraft manufacturers have done well (more supplying governments with military aircraft than commercial aviation, but that was for a while a good business too).
Cal Paterson thinks the same may be true of the business of Large Language Models–maybe they just aren’t great businesses?
Bit early to tell, but a well reasoned argument.
