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OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss

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Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss

#161

Post by christina97 »

wood_spirit wrote: post #89
stephc_int13 wrote: post #75

Everyone is trying to compare AI companies with something that happened in the past, but I don't think we can predict much from that. GPUs are not railroads or fiber optics. The cost structure of ChatGPT and other LLM based services is entirely different than web, they are very expensive to build but also cost a lot to serve. Companies like Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Google would all survive if their massive investment…

Unlike railroads and fibre, all the best compute in 2025 will be lacklustre in 2027. It won’t retain much value in the same way as the infrastructure of previous bubbles did?

The A100 came out 5.5 years ago and is still the staple for many AI/ML workloads. Even AI hardware just doesn’t depreciate that quickly.

Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss

#162

Post by runako »

I am not willing to render my personal verdict here yet.

Yet it is certainly true that at ~700m MAUs it is hard to say the product has not reached scale yet. It's not mature, but it's sort of hard to hand wave and say they are going to make the economics work at some future scale when they don't work at this size.

It really feels like they absolutely must find another revenue model for this to be viable. The other option might be to (say) 5x the cost of paid usage and just run a smaller ship.

Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss

#163

Post by dwaltrip »

fred_is_fred wrote: post #127
zurfer wrote: post #60

The $13.5B net loss doesn't mean they are in trouble, it's a lot of accounting losses. Actual cash burn in H1 2025 was $2.5B. With ~$17.5B on hand (based on last funding), that’s about 3.5 years of runway at current pace.

Deprecation only gets worse for them as they build-out, not better.

It gets worse until we hit the ceiling on what current tech is capable of.

Then they can stop burning cash on enormous training runs and have a shot at becoming profitable.

Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss

#164

Post by spiderice »

whizzter wrote: post #129
hgomersall wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will any survive?

I think OpenAI just added some shopping stuff to start enshittificatio^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmonetization of ChatGPT.

Apparently ^H is a shortcut for backspace. Good to know!

Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss

#165

Post by remus »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #140
munk-a wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both numbers are entirely ludicrous - highly skilled people are certainly quite valuable. But it's insane that these companies aren't just training up more internally. The 50x developer is a pervasive myth in our industry and it's one that needs to be put to rest.

The ∞x engineer exists in my opinion. There are some things that can only be executed by a few people that no body else could execute. Like you could throw 10000 engineers at a problem and they might not be able to solve that problem, but a single other person could solve that problem. I have known several people who have went to OAI and I would firmly say they are 10x engineers, but they are just doing general infra…

I think you're right to an extent (it's probably fair to say e.g. Einstein and Euler advanced their fields in ways others at the time are unlikely to have done), but I think it's much easier to work out who these people are after the fact whereas if you're dishing out a monster package you're effectively betting that you've found someone who's going to have this massive impact before they've done it. Perhaps a gamble you're willing to take, but a pretty big gamble nonetheless.

Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss

#166

Post by apinstein »

runako wrote: post #162

I am not willing to render my personal verdict here yet. Yet it is certainly true that at ~700m MAUs it is hard to say the product has not reached scale yet. It's not mature, but it's sort of hard to hand wave and say they are going to make the economics work at some future scale when they don't work at this size. It really feels like they absolutely must find another revenue model for this to be viable. The other op…

It’s not a hand wave…

The cost to serve a particular level of AI drops by like 10x a year. AI has gotten good enough that next year people can continue to use the current gen AI but at that point it will be profitable. Probably 70%+ gross margin.

Right now it’s a race for market share.

But once that backs off, prices will adjust to profitability. Not unlike the Uber/Lyft wars.

Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss

#167

Post by thinkindie »

Today I've tested Claude Code with small refactorings here and there in a medium sized project. I was surprised by the amount of token that every command was generating, even if the output was few lines updated for a bunch of files.

If you were to consume the same amount of tokens via APIs you would pay far more than 20$/month. Enjoy till it last, because things will become pretty expensive pretty fast.

Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss

#169

Post by lanthissa »

simonw wrote: post #58

I think the most interesting numbers in this piece (ignoring the stock compensation part) are: $4.3 billion in revenue - presumably from ChatGPT customers and API fees $6.7 billion spent on R&D $2 billion on sales and marketing - anyone got any idea what this is? I don't remember seeing many ads for ChatGPT but clearly I've not been paying attention in the right places. Open question for me: where does the cost of ru…

you see content about openai everywhere, they spent 2b on marketing, you're in the right places you just are used to seeing things labeled ads.

you remember everyone freaking out about gpt5 when it came out only for it to be a bust once people got their hands on it? thats what paid media looks like in the new world.

Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss

#170

Post by darth_avocado »

hadlock wrote: post #82
munk-a wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both numbers are entirely ludicrous - highly skilled people are certainly quite valuable. But it's insane that these companies aren't just training up more internally. The 50x developer is a pervasive myth in our industry and it's one that needs to be put to rest.

You have to out-pay to keep your talent from walking out the door. California does not have non-competes. With the number of AI startups in SF you don't need to relocate or even change your bus route in most cases.

This. The main reason OpenAI throws money at top level folks is because they can quickly replicate what they have at OpenAI elsewhere. Imagine you have a top level researcher who’s developed some techniques over multiple years that the competition doesn’t have. The same engineer can take them to another company and bring parity within months. And that’s on top of the progress slowing down within your company. I can’t steal IP, but but sure as hell can bring my head everywhere.
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