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

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

techinasia.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 720 posts

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

#201

Post by Spooky23 »

chermi wrote: post #183
gmerc wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop R&D and the competition is at parity with 10x cheaper models in 3-6 months. Stop training and your code model generates tech debt after 3-6 month

It's pretty well accepted now that for pre-training LLMs the curve is S not an exponential, right? Maybe it's all in RL post-training now, but my understanding(?) is that it's not nearly as expensive as pre-training. I don't think 3-6 months is the time to 10X improvement anymore (however that's measured), it seems closer to a year and growing assuming the plateau is real. I'd love to know if there are solid estimate…

Google has the best story imo. Gemini > Azure - it will accelerate GCP growth.

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

#202

Post by dzhiurgis »

christina97 wrote: post #161
wood_spirit wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This. There’s even a market for them being built (DRW).

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

#203

Post by conartist6 »

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…

It's not that the investments just won't pay off, it's that the global markets are likely to crash like happened with the subprime mortgage crisis.

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

#204

Post by mothballed »

conartist6 wrote: post #203
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…

It's not that the investments just won't pay off, it's that the global markets are likely to crash like happened with the subprime mortgage crisis.

The fed could still push the real value of stocks quite a bit by destroying the USD, if they want, by pinning interest rates near 0 and forcing a rush to the exits to buy stock and other asset classes.

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

#205

Post by chermi »

skywhopper wrote: post #147
layoric wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unlike railroads and fibre, all the best compute in 2025 will be lacklustre in 2027. I definitely don't think compute is anything like railroads and fibre, but I'm not so sure compute will continue it's efficiency gains of the past. Power consumption for these chips is climbing fast, lots of gains are from better hardware support for 8bit/4bit precision, I believe yields are getting harder to achieve as things get…

Unfortunately the chips themselves probably won’t physically last much longer than that under the workloads they are being put to. So, yes, they won’t be totally obsolete as technology in 2028, but they may still have to be replaced.

Do we actually know how they're degrading? Are there still Pascals out there? If not, is it because they actual broke or because of poor performance? I understand it's tempting to say near 100% workload for multiple years = fast degradation, but what are the actual stats? Are you talking specifically about the actual compute chip or the whole compute system -- I know there's a big difference now with the systems Nvidia is selling. How long do typical Intel/AMD CPU server chips last? My impression is a long time.

If we're talking about the whole compute system like a gb200, is there a particular component that breaks first? How hard are they to refurbish, if that particular component breaks? I'm guessing they didn't have repairability in mind, but I also know these "chips" are much more than chips now so there's probably some modularity if it's not the chip itself failing.

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

#207

Post by redwood »

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…

I'm reminded of the quote "If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem." - J. Paul Getty

Nvidia may well be at the mercy of them! Hence the recent circular dealing

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

#208

Post by mcny »

mothballed wrote: post #204
conartist6 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that the investments just won't pay off, it's that the global markets are likely to crash like happened with the subprime mortgage crisis.

The fed could still push the real value of stocks quite a bit by destroying the USD, if they want, by pinning interest rates near 0 and forcing a rush to the exits to buy stock and other asset classes.

The point still stands though. All these other companies can pivot to some thing else if AI fails but what will OpenAI do?

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

#209

Post by Spooky23 »

adventured wrote: post #25
JCM9 wrote: post #8

These numbers are pretty ugly. You always expect new tech to operate at a loss initially but the structure of their losses is not something one easily scales out of. In fact it gets more painful as they scale. Unless something fundamentally changes and fast this is gonna get ugly real quick.

There is an exceptionally obvious solution for OpenAI & ChatGPT: ads. In fact it's an unavoidable solution. There is no future for OpenAI that doesn't involve a gigantic, highly lucrative ad network attached to ChatGPT. One of the dumbest things in tech at present is OpenAI not having already deployed this. It's an attitude they can't actually afford to maintain much longer. Ads are a hyper margin product that are ve…

No way. It’s 2025, society is totally different, you have to think about what is the new normal. They are too big to fail at this point — so much of the S&P 500 valuation is tied to AI (Microsoft, Google, Tesla, etc) they are arguable strategic to the US.

Fascist corporatism will throw them in for whatever Intel rescue plan Nvidia is forced to participate in. If the midterms flip congress or if we have another presidential election, maybe something will change.

Post reply on HN