Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 777 posts

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

#131

Post by tayo42 »

jdminhbg wrote: post #111
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 consu…

Can Claude not do that? I've sent it pictures for simpler things and got answers, usually Id of bugs and plants.

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

#132

Post by Ginden »

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 almost everyone involved in AI race grew up in "winner takes it all" environments, typical for software, and they try really hard to make it reality. This means your model should do everything to just take 90% of market share, or at least 90% of specific niche.

The problem is, they can't find the moat, despite searching very hard, whatever you bake into your AI, your competitors will be able to replicate in few months. This is why OpenAI is striking deal with Disney, because copyright provides such moat.

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

#134

Post by senshan »

agentifysh wrote: post #103
gip wrote: post #31

There is no doubt that OpenAI is taking a lot of risks by betting that AI adoption will translate into revenues in the very short term. And that could really happen imo (with a low probability sure, but worth the risk for VCs? Probably).

It's mathematically impossible what OpenAI is promising. They know it. The goal is to be too big to fail and get bailed out by US taxpayers who have been groomed into viewing AI as a cold war style arms race that America cannot lose.

> It's mathematically impossible what OpenAI is promising

Citation is needed

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

#135

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Alconicon wrote: post #85
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 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…

> Who wants to copy&paste prompts between ai agents?

An AI!

The specialist vs generalist debate is still open. And for complex problems, sure, having a model that runs on a small galaxy may be worth it. But for most tasks, a fleet of tailor-made smaller models being called on by an agent seems like a solidly-precedented (albeit not singularity-triggering) bet.

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

#136

Post by sod22 »

Ginden wrote: post #132
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 almost everyone involved in AI race grew up in "winner takes it all" environments, typical for software, and they try really hard to make it reality. This means your model should do everything to just take 90% of market share, or at least 90% of specific niche. The problem is, they can't find the moat, despite searching very hard, whatever you bake into your AI, your competitors will be able to replicate in f…

Striking deals without a proper vision is a waste of resources. And that’s the path OAI is on.

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

#137

Post by JumpCrisscross »

andsoitis wrote: post #5

In a parallel universe, governments invest in the compute/datacenters (read: infra), and let model makers compete on the same playing field.

> governments invest in the compute/datacenters (read: infra), and let model makers compete on the same playing field

Hmm, what about member-owned coöperatives? Like what we have for stock exchanges.

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

#138

Post by bdangubic »

anomaly_ wrote: post #130
password54321 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's like half the poster on here live in some parallel universe. I am making real money using generated image/video advertising content for both B2C and B2B goods. I am using Whisper and LLMs to review customer service call logs at scale and identity development opportunities for staff. I am using GPT/Gemini to help write SQL queries and little python scripts to do data analysis on my customer base. My business's pr…

that (very vocal) half tried it once and it didn’t work :)

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

#139

Post by avalys »

AI is going to be a highly-competitive, extremely capital-intensive commodity market that ends up in a race to the bottom competing on cost and efficiency of delivering models that have all reached the same asymptotic performance in the sense of intelligence, reasoning, etc.

The simple evidence for this is that everyone who has invested the same resources in AI has produced roughly the same result. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Deepseek, etc. There's no evidence of a technological moat or a competitive advantage in any of these companies.

The conclusion? AI is a world-changing technology, just like the railroads were, and it is going to soon explode in a huge bubble - just like the railroads did. That doesn't mean AI is going to go away, or that it won't change the world - railroads are still here and they did change the world - but from a venture investment perspective, get ready for a massive downturn.

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

#140

Post by robkop »

agentifysh wrote: post #105
_ache_ wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

what are you talking about Gemini adoption has tripled in a few months alone and have around 18% of marketshare and its accelerating.

I’ve heard too many rumors that much of that adoption is from copying ms i.e. bundling gemini into their office suite
Post reply on HN