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

economist.com

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

#111

Post by jdminhbg »

password54321 wrote: post #49

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

Because for all the incessant whining about "slop," multimodal AI i/o is incredibly useful. Being able to take a photo of a home repair issue, have it diagnosed, and return a diagram showing you what to do with it is great, and it's the same algos that power the slop. "Sorry, you'll have to go to Gemini for that use case, people got mad about memes on the internet" is not really a good way for them to be a mass consumer company.

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

#112

Post by pclmulqdq »

HardCodedBias wrote: post #107

OpenAI has #5 traffic levels globally. Their product-market fit is undeniable. The question is monetization. Their cost to serve each request is roughly 3 orders of magnitude higher than conventional web sites. While it is clear people see value in the product, we only know they see value at today’s subsidized prices. It is possible that inference prices will continue their rapid decline. Or it is possible that OAI w…

It's easy to get product-market fit when you give away dollars for the price of pennies.

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

#113

Post by bdangubic »

oh_my_goodness wrote: post #39
bdangubic wrote: post #18

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 become the next Uber, do I just need to run huge losses?

I wouldn’t but path to success can clearly come from running 10-digit losses for a loooong time, no?

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

#114

Post by zdragnar »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #55
zdragnar wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are arguments aplenty that schooling and a minimum amount of healthcare are public goods, as are roads built on public land (the government owns most roads after all). What is the justification for considering data centers capable of running LLMs to be a public good? There are many counter examples of things many people use but are still private. Clothing stores, restaurants and grocery stores, farms, home appl…

a distinction: the data centers have become the means of production, unlike clothing from a store

How is that distinct from any of my other examples which listed factories? Very few factories in the US are publicly owned; citing data centers as places of production merely furthers the argument that they should remain private.

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

#115

Post by wg0 »

esel2k wrote: post #42
adriand wrote: 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?

Anti Gravity is a flop. I mean it uses Gemini under the hood.

But you cannot use it with an API key.

If you're on a workspace account, you can't have normal individual plan.

You have to have the team plan with $100/month or nothing.

Google's product management tier is beyond me.

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

#116

Post by bdangubic »

jcranmer wrote: post #51
bdangubic wrote: post #18

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?

IIRC, current estimates are that OpenAI is losing as much money a year as Uber or Amazon lost in their entire lifetime of unprofitability. Also, both Uber and Amazon spent their unprofitable years having a clear roadmap to profitability. OpenAI's roadmap to profitability is "???"

I have lived through Amazon’s rags to riches and there was never a clear plan to profitability. Vast majority of people were questioning sanity of anyone investing in Amazon.

I am not saying OpenAI is Amazon but am saying I have seen this before where masses are going “oh business is bad, losses are huge, where is path to profitability…”

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

#117

Post by zdragnar »

reverserdev wrote: post #101
zdragnar wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are arguments aplenty that schooling and a minimum amount of healthcare are public goods, as are roads built on public land (the government owns most roads after all). What is the justification for considering data centers capable of running LLMs to be a public good? There are many counter examples of things many people use but are still private. Clothing stores, restaurants and grocery stores, farms, home appl…

Libraries with books are likely considered public goods right? Why not an LLM datacenter if it also offers information? You could say it's the public library of the future maybe.

Not all libraries are publicly owned or accessible. Most are run by local municipalities because they wouldn't exist otherwise.

Data centers clearly can exist without being owned by the public.

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

#118

Post by adastra22 »

password54321 wrote: post #91
Alconicon wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because OpenAI stands for AI leader. If Gemini can create or edit an image, chatgpt needs to be able to do this too. Who wants to copy&paste prompts between ai agents? Also if you want to have more semantics, you add image, video and audio to your model. It gets smarter because of it. OpenAI is also relevant bigger than antropic and is known as a generic 'helper'. Antropic probably saw the benefits of being more focu…

>Also if you want to have more semantics, you add image, video and audio to your model. It gets smarter because of it. I think you are confusing generation with analysis. As far I am aware your model does not need to be good at generating images to be able to decode an image.

It is, to first approximation, the same thing. The generative part of genAI is just running the analysis model in reverse.

Now there are all sorts of tricks to get the output of this to be good, and maybe they shouldn't be spending time and resources on this. But the core capability is shared.

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

#119

Post by oh_my_goodness »

bdangubic wrote: post #113
oh_my_goodness wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To become the next Uber, do I just need to run huge losses?

I wouldn’t but path to success can clearly come from running 10-digit losses for a loooong time, no?

I think you're saying that just running up huge losses is sufficient to create a successful company? But that you personally wouldn't want to run up huge losses? Not sure.

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

#120

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

IshKebab wrote: post #67
adriand wrote: 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 smar…

And they have hardware as well, and their own cloud platform.

In my view Google is uniquely well positioned because, contrary to the others, it controls most of the raw materials for Ai.

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