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OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

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Re: OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

#61
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not that I disagree but would it be fair to say though that we have seen this before where it turned out OK? say Uber? Amazon?

To my knowledge Amazon never debt financed their ops like this

Amazon did borrow money, for a long time.

Re: OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

#62
post #42
post #30

This article doesn’t add anything to what we know already. It’s still an open question what happens with the labs this coming year, but I personally think Anthropic’s focus on coding represents the clearest path to subscriber-based success (typical SaaS) whereas OpenAI has a clear opportunity with advertising. Both of these paths could be very lucrative. Meanwhile I expect Google will continue to struggle with making…

Where does google struggle to make products people don’t want to use? Is it a personal opinion?

Bart was a flop. Google search is losing market share to other LLM providers. Gemini adoption is low, people around me prefer OpenAI because it is good enough and known.

But on the contrary, Nano Banana is very good, so I don't know. And in the end, I'm pretty confident Google will be the AI race winner, because they got the engineers, they tech background and the money. Unless Google Adsense die, they can continue the race forever.

Re: OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

#63
post #27

The fact is nobody has any idea what OpenAI's cash burn is. Measuring how much they're raising is not an adequate proxy. For all we know, they could be accumulating capital to weather an AI winter. It's also worth noting that OpenAI has not trained a new model since gpt4o (all subsequent models are routing systems and prompt chains built on top of 4), so the idea of OpenAI being stuck in some kind of runaway training…

wasn't 4.5 new

Yes it was, op didn't read the reporting closely enough. It said something to the effect of "Didn't pretrain a new broadly released, generally available model"

Re: OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

#64
post #56
post #30

This article doesn’t add anything to what we know already. It’s still an open question what happens with the labs this coming year, but I personally think Anthropic’s focus on coding represents the clearest path to subscriber-based success (typical SaaS) whereas OpenAI has a clear opportunity with advertising. Both of these paths could be very lucrative. Meanwhile I expect Google will continue to struggle with making…

What Google AI products do people not want to use? Gemini is catching up to chatpt from a MAU perspective, ai overviews in search are super popular and staggeringly more used than any other ai-based product out there, a Google ai mode has decent usage, and Google Lens has surprisingly high usage. These products together dwarf everyone else out there by like 10x.

> ai overviews in search are super popular and staggeringly more used than any other ai-based product out there

This really is the critical bit. A year ago, the spin was "ChatGPT AI results are better than search, why would you use Google?", now it's "Search result AI is just as good as ChatGPT, why bother?".

When they were disruptive, it was enough to be different to believe that they'd win. Now they need to actually be better. And... they kinda aren't, really? I mean, lots of people like them! But for Regular Janes at the keyboard, who cares? Just type your search and see what it says.

Re: OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

#65
post #27

The fact is nobody has any idea what OpenAI's cash burn is. Measuring how much they're raising is not an adequate proxy. For all we know, they could be accumulating capital to weather an AI winter. It's also worth noting that OpenAI has not trained a new model since gpt4o (all subsequent models are routing systems and prompt chains built on top of 4), so the idea of OpenAI being stuck in some kind of runaway training…

They have not successfully trained a new model since 4o. That doesn’t mean they haven’t burned a pile of cash trying.

I know sama says they aren’t trying to train new models, but he’s also a known liar and would definitely try to spin systemic failure.

Re: OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

#66
post #27

The fact is nobody has any idea what OpenAI's cash burn is. Measuring how much they're raising is not an adequate proxy. For all we know, they could be accumulating capital to weather an AI winter. It's also worth noting that OpenAI has not trained a new model since gpt4o (all subsequent models are routing systems and prompt chains built on top of 4), so the idea of OpenAI being stuck in some kind of runaway training…

wasn't 4.5 new

Wasn't 4.5 before 4o?

Re: OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

#67
post #30

This article doesn’t add anything to what we know already. It’s still an open question what happens with the labs this coming year, but I personally think Anthropic’s focus on coding represents the clearest path to subscriber-based success (typical SaaS) whereas OpenAI has a clear opportunity with advertising. Both of these paths could be very lucrative. Meanwhile I expect Google will continue to struggle with making…

I don't. Google has at least a few advantages:

1. Google books, which they legally scanned. No dubious training sets for them. They also regularly scrape the entire internet. And they have YouTube. Easy access to the best training data, all legally.

2. Direct access to the biggest search index. When you ask ChatGPT to search for something it is basically just doing what we do but a bit faster. Google can be much smarter, and because it has direct access it's also faster. Search is a huge use case of these services.

3. They have existing services like Android, Gmail, Google Maps, Photos, Assistant/Home etc. that they can integrate into their AI.

The difference in model capability seems to be marginal at best, or even in Google's favour.

OpenAI has "it's not Google" going for it, and also AI brand recognition (everyone knows what ChatGPT is). Tbh I doubt that will be enough.

Re: OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same reason they should own access lines: everyone needs rackspace/access, it should be treated like a public service to avoid rent seeing. Having a data center in every city where all of the local lines terminate into could open the doors to a lot of interesting use cases, really help with local resiliency/decentralization efforts, and provide a great alternative to cloud providers that doesn't break the bank.

should the government own all types of "public services"? e.g. search index, video serving infra, etc?

Public ownership of public services hmm?

Re: OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

#69

Not sure why they put so much investment into videoSlop and imageSlop. Anthropic seems to be more focused at least.

Because their main use is for advertising/propaganda, which is largely videoSlop & imageSlop even without AI.

Outside of this: https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/ I don't think there has been much of a win for them even in advertising for image/video slop.

Re: OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

#70
post #38
post #27

The fact is nobody has any idea what OpenAI's cash burn is. Measuring how much they're raising is not an adequate proxy. For all we know, they could be accumulating capital to weather an AI winter. It's also worth noting that OpenAI has not trained a new model since gpt4o (all subsequent models are routing systems and prompt chains built on top of 4), so the idea of OpenAI being stuck in some kind of runaway training…

How are they updating the data then? Wouldn’t the cutoff date be getting further away from today?

RAG? Even for a "fresh" model, there is no way to keep it up to date, so there has to be a mechanism by which to reference eg last night's football game.
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