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

211–220 of 720 posts

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

#211

Post by rchaud »

Spooky23 wrote: post #196
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?

Unlike 1875, we have Saudi and other tillion/billionaires willing commit almost any amount to own the future of business.

Except they behave less like shrewd investors and more like bandwagon jumpers looking to buy influence or get rich quick. Crypto, Twitter, ridesharing, office sharing and now AI. None of these have been the future of business.

Business looks a lot like what it has throughout history. Building physical transport infrastructure, trade links, improving agricultural and manufacturing productivity and investing in military advancements. In the latter respect, countries like Turkey and Iran are decades ahead of Saudi in terms of building internal security capacity with drone tech for example.

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

#212

Post by VerminOctopus1 »

I’m struggling to see how OpenAI survives this in the long term. They have numerous competitors and their moat is weak. Google above all others seems poised to completely eat OpenAI’s lunch. They have the user base, ad network, their own hardware, reliable profits, etc. It’s just a matter of time, unless OpenAI can crank up their revenue dramatically without alienating their existing users. I’d be sweating if I had invested heavily in OpenAI.

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

#213

Post by sumeno »

anthonypasq wrote: post #28
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.

they could keep the current model in chatGPT the same forver and 99% of users wouldnt know or care, and unless you think hardware isnt going to improve, the cost of that will basically decrease to 0.

This just doesn't match with the claims that people are using it as a replacement for Google. If your facts are out of date you're useless as a search engine

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

#215

Post by mandeepj »

mcny wrote: post #208
mothballed wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> but what will OpenAI do?

Will get acquired at “Store Closing” price!!

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

#216

Post by rglover »

mcny wrote: post #208
mothballed wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sell to Microsoft and be absorbed there (and Anthropic to Amazon).

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

#217

Post by epolanski »

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.

I'm not sure.

Number of cycles that goes through silicon matters, but what matters most really are temperature and electrical shocks.

If the GPUs are stable, at low temperature they can be at full load for years. There are servers out there up from decades and decades.

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

#218

Post by hamdingers »

lbreakjai wrote: post #109
xnx wrote: post #47

The only way OpenAI survives is that "ChatGPT" gets stuck in peoples heads as being the only or best AI tool. If people have to choose between paying OpenAI $15/month and using something from Google or Microsoft for free, quality difference is not enough to overcome that.

Do people at large even care, or do they use "chatGPT" as a generic term for LLM?

Of course they don't, but when they want to use an LLM they're going to type "chatgpt" into the address bar or app store and that's a tremendous advantage.

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

#219

Post by vitaflo »

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.

This is much closer to the dotcom boom than the subprime stuff. The dotcom boom/bust affected tech more than anything else. It didn’t involve consumers like the housing crash did.

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

#220

Post by rubyfan »

mcny wrote: post #208
mothballed wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

By the time it catches up with them they will have IPO’d and dumped their problem onto the public market. The administration will probably get a golden share and they will get a bail out in an effort to soften the landing for their campaign donors that also have huge positions. All the rich people will be made whole and the US tax payer will pay the price of the bail out.

And Microsoft or whoever will absorb the remains of their technology.

Post reply on HN