They aren't in the black at all, let alone "insanely" so. Maybe if they just did commercial launches on falcon 9, but instead they've been shoveling those "huge margins" straight back into r&d on starship etc.
I can just see the meeting where the apple developers pitched this. "Some of our users want to stare at their black rectangles for 18 hours a day but unfortunately have to take a break and stare out of the window because of motion sickness. How can we help them in order to drive up usage even more?"
There's probably a meeting going on somewhere inside google/apple right now to work out how to cure humans of the need for sleep.
The impacts haven't really been seen yet because Japan is still on the flat apex of the population curve, but the rollercoaster is about to start diving.
This argument gets trotted out every time but it doesn't convince me of anything. Yes, calling things out creates an incentive for people to hide them, but so what?
Setting aside the whole AI = bad argument, let's do a metaphor. Tax evasion is bad and unethical and you should call it out where you see it. But wait, that creates an incentive for people to hide it! So I'd better not call it out, it's best to just keep my mouth shut.
Anthropic have only scraped together a month of profitability by cooking the books. They have an extreme compute discount from spacex that only applies for the first couple of months of the deal. By pushing the costs down the road they can make themselves look good before IPO. Even they have admitted publicly though that they don't expect profitability to last.
Nethack is best played completely spoiled with the wiki open at all times. You'll miss the amazing interactions and stuff otherwise, and it is still challenging either way. It was basically made to be played by source divers in the days before wiki diving.
Savescumming is also just explore/wizard mode with more steps.
A NAS is just an example, here's a better one; I love to use my old phones as wall mounted displays and controls for home assistant, or as remote music players plugged in to some speakers that I can hook into in music assistant. Some of my old phones are more than capable of this hardware wise but are locked to older versions of android and can't run anything built for a newer version, so they end up as ewaste intstead.
I think my next phone is going to be a fairphone or something for this reason.
Ignores the cost of model training, R&D, managing the data centers and more. OpenAI etc regularly admit that all their products lose money. Not to mention the fact that it isn't enough to cover their costs, they have to pay back all those investors while actually generating a profit at some point in the future.
AI doesn't have hopes and desires or something it would rather be doing. It has a utility function that it will optimise for regardless of all else. This doesn't change when it gets smarter, or even when it gets super-intelligence.