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

21–30 of 777 posts

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

#21

Post by dmitrygr »

cambrianentropy wrote: post #16
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.

In a completely alternate dimension, a quarter of the capital being invested in AI literally just goes towards making sure everyone has quality food and water.

Without capital invested in the past we wouldn’t have almost anything of modern technology. That has done a lot more for everyone, including food affordability, than actually simply buying food for people to eat once.

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

#22

Post by 3eb7988a1663 »

aucisson_masque wrote: post #12
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.

I’d rather stay far away from this parallel universe. Why would you want my money to be used to build datacenter that won’t benefit me ? I might use a LLM once a month, many people never use it. Let the one who use it pay for it.

You are already paying for several national lab HPC centers. These are used for government/university research - no idea if commercial interests can rent time on them. The big ones are running weather, astronomy simulations, nuclear explosions, biological sequencing, and so on.

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

#23

Post by simonw »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #17
simonw wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that did happen, how would the government then issue those resources? OpenAI ask for 1m GPUs for a month, Anthropic ask for 2m, the government data center only has 500,000, and a new startup wants 750,000 as well. Do you hand them out to the most convincing pitch? Hopefully not to the biggest donor to your campaign. Now the most successful AI lab is the one that's best at pitching the government for additional res…

National HPC labs have been over subscribed for decades with extensive queueing/time sharing allocation systems. It would still likely devolve into most-money-wins, but it is not an insurmountable political obstacle to arrange some sort of sharing. Edit: I meant to say over subscribed , not over provisioned. There are far more jobs in the queue than can be handled at once

Huh, TIL - thanks for the correction.

https://www.ornl.gov/news/doe-incite-program-seeks-2026-prop...

> The Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment, or INCITE, program has announced the 2026 Call for Proposals, inviting researchers to apply for access to some of the world’s most powerful high-performance computing systems.

> The proposal submission window runs from April 11 to June 16, 2025, offering an opportunity for scientific teams to secure substantial computational resources for large-scale research projects in fields such as scientific modeling, simulation, data analytics and artificial intelligence. [...]

> Individual awards typically range from 500,000 to 1,000,000 node-hours on Aurora and Frontier and 100,000 to 250,000 node-hours on Polaris, with the possibility of larger allocations for exceptional proposals. [...]

> The selection process involves a rigorous peer review, assessing both scientific merit and computational readiness. Awards will be announced in November 2025, with access to resources beginning in 2026.

Not sure OpenAI/Anthropic etc would be OK with a six month gap between application and getting access to the resources, but this does indeed demonstrate that government issued super-computing resources is a previously solved problem.

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

#24

Post by pear01 »

simonw wrote: post #9
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.

If that did happen, how would the government then issue those resources? OpenAI ask for 1m GPUs for a month, Anthropic ask for 2m, the government data center only has 500,000, and a new startup wants 750,000 as well. Do you hand them out to the most convincing pitch? Hopefully not to the biggest donor to your campaign. Now the most successful AI lab is the one that's best at pitching the government for additional res…

Well, people bid for USA government resources all the time. It's why the Washington DC suburbs have some of the country's most affluent neighborhoods among their ranks.

In theory it makes the process more transparent and fair, although slower. That calculus has been changing as of late, perhaps for both good and bad. See for example the Pentagon's latest support of drone startups run by twenty-year-olds.

The question of public and private distinctions in these various schemes are very interesting and imo, underexplored. Especially when you consider how these private LLMs are trained on public data.

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

#25

Post by Zigurd »

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.

Prediction: on this thread you'll get a lot of talk about how government would slow things down. But when the AI bubble starts to look shaky, see how fast all the tech bros line up for a "public private partnership."

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

#27

Post by mvkel »

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 expense is not real.

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

#28

Post by magpi3 »

inerte wrote: post #19
aucisson_masque wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d rather stay far away from this parallel universe. Why would you want my money to be used to build datacenter that won’t benefit me ? I might use a LLM once a month, many people never use it. Let the one who use it pay for it.

That's like every government initiative. Same as healthcare? School? I mean if you don't have children why do you pay taxes... and roads if you don't drive? I mean the examples are so many... why do you bring this argument that if it doesn't benefit you directly right now today, it shouldn't be done?

Healthcare, schools, roads, generative AI. One of these things is not like the others.

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

#29

Post by marcellus23 »

cambrianentropy wrote: post #16
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.

In a completely alternate dimension, a quarter of the capital being invested in AI literally just goes towards making sure everyone has quality food and water.

I'd rather live in a universe where that money is taken out of the military budget.

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

#30

Post by adriand »

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 products that people actually want to use, irrespective of the quality of its models.
Post reply on HN