Valerian missed the mark; I'm sure it's got great designs (although I also believe it's mostly CGI), but the story of the movie is disjointed (which is a risk when trying to merge multiple storylines into one) and the actors are lifeless.
I've grown to like Valerian over rewatches, but unfortunately it suffers from Besson being a massive Valerian fanboy and trying to stuff everything he possibly could into it... I think he'd have done far better if he'd gotten a more limited budget, or had to produce three of them for the cost of the one he did...
The Fifth Element and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets are widely considered to share a thematic and stylistic universe, with similar aesthetic influences. There are shared elements (ha!) and aesthetics, with Valerian even featuring a shop called "Korbens" as an easter egg to The Fifth Element.
Unfortunately the movie doesn't do it for me, the 90s were a better time.
Once CGI became good storytelling and creativity took a backseat in Hollywood.
> Within a year of launching ChatGPT, we reached $1B in revenue. By the end of 2024 we were generating $1B per quarter. We are now generating $2B in revenue per month.
They raised $122B.
122 / 12*2 = 5 years to get your money back (I simplify, I know revenue <> profit)
They are so big that almost no one can afford to acquire them. It is similar as someone would like to acquire MSFT or AAPL.
Revenue is on metric. Another important metric is gross margin.
OpenAI's gross margin is estimated at 33%[0]. They also have to pay Microsoft 20% of revenue.
So, for each $1 of revenue:
Revenue $1.00
COGS (inference) (0.67)
Microsoft (0.20)
Gross margin $0.13
That $0.13 must cover "everything else": R&D, payroll, etc., and ideally leave some profit on the table.
The problem for OpenAI (and other pure AI companies) is that inference is not like software that sells at marginal cost (build once, sell everywhere), but each token costs money. Inference gets cheaper, but newer models require more computing power and consume more tokens. So the gross margin does not improve over time.
Break-even in the future won't come from just growing API usage and subscriber base.
Well… because it is not almost possible do it solo.
Code is just one part of puzzle. Add: Pricing, marketing and ads, invoicing, VAT, make really good onboarding, measure churn rate, do customer service…
A lot of vibe coders are solopreneurs. You have to be very consistent and disciplined to make final product that sells.
> […] At one point, his spending on AI reached $100,000 a year. That went toward subscriptions to AI tools from Google, Anthropic and OpenAI, as well as fees to access their models directly through application programming interfaces,[…]
The Fifth Element has similar cinematic feeling as the first Blade Runner.
And now it is clear. There is the same person behind it :)
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