OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B • Hacker News Board

Re: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B

#141

Post by steve_adams_86 » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 10:30 PM UTC

cammikebrown wrote: post #130

cj wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d easily pay multiple hundreds. Possibly a thousand a month. If I were really forced to. LLMs provide me about the same value as a car does.

Paying a thousand a month for a car is also very stupid.

Stretching the analogy, something that gets you from point A to point B for a fraction of the price without the same level of comfort is totally fine for me. For some of my tasks, that means using local models. For others it might mean a frontier-last-year kind of model. That's totally acceptable most of the time. For anything else I guess it's like renting a truck to move; just get the right vehicle as needed and pay the premium.

Re: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B

#142

Post by Mwntalhwalth » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 10:30 PM UTC

nancyminusone wrote: post #133

pluc wrote: post #117

I'm really curious about something: how far will you go to support AI? Clearly they'll need to monetize things further, would you still use [whatever AI you are paying for] if the price was doubled? Tripled? Where would you stop and would you stop using AI altogether or would you look at competitors?

I've spent a grand total of $25 on AI ever, so apparently my answer is $25. But I'm not a big time software dev like the rest of you. When I bought my last GPU, running AI models locally was a consideration though not the only one, and I have it set up but haven't used it much yet. I mostly use the free tiers of ChatGPT or Google to write the occasional script for me. I guess they're going to have to inject a truly u…

I'm not a coder but now work way faster than the coder I pay, stuff breaks but it's tenable and it's easier to get things to completion as the harnesses get better.

Don't give up just keep trying you can truly build personally life changing things. Don't look at it purely from a how do I sell this lense, just empower yourself with these tools while the getting is good

Re: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B

#143

Post by natas » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 10:32 PM UTC

Napkin maths.

Alphabet: ~$4.5T value / ~$403B revenue ≈ 11× revenue

Microsoft: ~$2.9T value / ~$282B revenue ≈ 10× revenue

OpenAI: ~$850B value / ~$13B revenue ≈ 65× revenue

Can someone explains that logic?

Re: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B

#144

Post by LaurensBER » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 10:32 PM UTC

vb-8448 wrote: post #132

Almost 6 bln in sales in marketing? It looks an enormous amount given that they used to have the best models and used to give-aways tokens.

6bn seems excessive but despite GPT 5.5 arguably being better than Claude I don't see a lot of adoption of Codex yet.

Some of my coworkers even use Sonnet (the default in Claude Code for the 20 USD subscription) and see no reason to change even though that model is definitely "outdated" compared to current SOTA.

Re: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B

#145

Post by pooploop64 » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 10:33 PM UTC

llmslave wrote: post #126

Leaked: OpenAI is a rapidly scaling startup, has economics similar to other startups

If anything this is MORE evidence that the infinite money printer will be coming online any second now! Yep aaaaany second now... OH THERE IT- awww one of you guys wasn't praying hard enough.

Re: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B

#146

Post by bigstrat2003 » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 10:34 PM UTC

pluc wrote: post #117

I'm really curious about something: how far will you go to support AI? Clearly they'll need to monetize things further, would you still use [whatever AI you are paying for] if the price was doubled? Tripled? Where would you stop and would you stop using AI altogether or would you look at competitors?

Zero. It provides no value to me.

Re: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B

#147

Post by rvz » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 10:37 PM UTC

orphereus wrote: post #119

Suspicious lack of pro-AI comments here

You mean the lack of pro-Anthropic/OpenAI comments, who are gambling tokens at their casinos and won't admit that they are very expensive.

This is because people here are quietly realizing that they fell for the "token-maxxing" marketing drive which was complete BS for you to gamble more money on tokens as the big AI labs gave heavily subsidized token prices they cannot afford.

Jevon's paradox does not exist at those companies, but it certainly exists at the Chinese AI Labs at Deepseek, Alibaba, z.AI and Xiaomi.

Re: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B

#148

Post by dofm » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 10:37 PM UTC

pluc wrote: post #117

I'm really curious about something: how far will you go to support AI? Clearly they'll need to monetize things further, would you still use [whatever AI you are paying for] if the price was doubled? Tripled? Where would you stop and would you stop using AI altogether or would you look at competitors?

I will do nothing to “support” AI. Either it has utility or it doesn’t. I feel no loyalty or duty to help make it work if it doesn’t.

Anyway: Zero, as of right now.

I fully expect to be able to run useful LLMs on a machine I can justify buying for other reasons. I already can on the secondhand kit I own, and I don’t expect the cost-benefit analysis of local LLMs to ever really get worse.

If I ever need to pay for it, it will likely be to shift some of the capacity into the cloud for either business or pragmatic personal reasons (so I can just carry an iPad etc.)

I fully intend my expenditure to be negligible. Because once one realises that outspending others is impossible, only spending minimisation makes sense.

I foresee it potentially making sense for me to move some mature tools off a local LLM to openrouter, maybe. But probably to the same or similar models.

Re: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B

#149

Post by joegibbs » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 10:37 PM UTC

natas wrote: post #143

Napkin maths. Alphabet: ~$4.5T value / ~$403B revenue ≈ 11× revenue Microsoft: ~$2.9T value / ~$282B revenue ≈ 10× revenue OpenAI: ~$850B value / ~$13B revenue ≈ 65× revenue Can someone explains that logic?

AI is growing much faster than the other components of MS and Alphabet's business, and OAI is 100% dedicated to AI while the other two only have small portions on AI

Re: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B

#150

Post by mvkel » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 10:38 PM UTC

My takeaway from this is that it's incredibly validating as a business model. Inference is _highly_ profitable. Of course, like any company that has ever tried to grow at breakneck pace, you run at a loss until you "win."