Yup, fully agreed with your take on Amazon being similar to today's LLM providers.
Today's LLM providers have the same choice as Amazon had back then. They could just stop advancing/expanding, and instead try harnessing that profit. They choose not to, they instead bet on fast expansion/advancement, and it makes total sense to me (especially as the competition rn between all those LLM providers seems to be very heated, as opposed to what Amazon dealt with at the time).
Uber is different, though. There was no point at which they could just call it a day and go "alright, we are fully self-sufficient, and we can just start collecting profits from our services as soon as tomorrow." Expansion or not, unless I am missing something, Uber wasn't in a position where they were profitable (and just chose to forego profits in favor of spending the money on expanding). To be clear, they indeed spent money on expanding, I am just questioning the part about their expansion being done using the funds that could've otherwise made the difference between them being profitable and not.
Today's LLM providers have the same choice as Amazon had back then. They could just stop advancing/expanding, and instead try harnessing that profit. They choose not to, they instead bet on fast expansion/advancement, and it makes total sense to me (especially as the competition rn between all those LLM providers seems to be very heated, as opposed to what Amazon dealt with at the time).
Uber is different, though. There was no point at which they could just call it a day and go "alright, we are fully self-sufficient, and we can just start collecting profits from our services as soon as tomorrow." Expansion or not, unless I am missing something, Uber wasn't in a position where they were profitable (and just chose to forego profits in favor of spending the money on expanding). To be clear, they indeed spent money on expanding, I am just questioning the part about their expansion being done using the funds that could've otherwise made the difference between them being profitable and not.