When I first heard about this bankruptcy, one of my first thoughts was, here it goes. This is only the very beginning of the landslide though, so it’s going to take a while before it reaches the bottom, and it’s going to pick up a lot more debris on the way.
I don’t know. Pets.com failed because they weren’t adequately prepared for their success. AI seems to fail because they overprepared for success that was never coming.
I’m not sure that’s an accurate or defensible perspective on why they failed. From Wikipedia:
Pets.com lacked a workable business plan and lost money on nearly every sale because, even before the cost of advertising, it was selling merchandise for approximately one-third the price it paid to obtain the products.[22] Pets.com tried to build a customer base by offering discounts and free shipping, but it was impossible to turn a profit while absorbing the costs of shipping for heavy bags of cat litter and cans of pet food within a business field whose conventional profit margins are only two to four percent.[22][23] The company hoped to shift customers into higher-margin purchases, but customer purchasing patterns failed to change and during its second fiscal year the company continued to sell merchandise for approximately 27% less than cost, so the dramatic rise in sales during Pets.com’s second fiscal year only hastened the firm’s demise.[22]
When I first heard about this bankruptcy, one of my first thoughts was, here it goes. This is only the very beginning of the landslide though, so it’s going to take a while before it reaches the bottom, and it’s going to pick up a lot more debris on the way.
Or, as the article optimisitically puts it:
Wrong. Character.AI may come to be seen as the first car in the train to derail.
It’s the “Pets.com” of AI.
I don’t know. Pets.com failed because they weren’t adequately prepared for their success. AI seems to fail because they overprepared for success that was never coming.
I’m not sure that’s an accurate or defensible perspective on why they failed. From Wikipedia:
Huh. That’s what I get for only having learned of the matter from engineering textbooks.
A trillion or two will put that train right back on its tracks
Yes. We could still try blindly throwing money at the problem. /s
Thanks for the laugh.