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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

#231

Post by nojs »

I think people are massively underestimating the money they will come from ads in the future.

They generated $4.3B in revenue without any advertising program to monetise their 700 million weekly active users, most of whom use the free product.

Google earns essentially all of its revenue from ads, $264B in 2024. ChatGPT has more consumer trust than Google at this point, and numerous ways of inserting sponsored results, which they’re starting to experiment with with the recent announcement of direct checkout.

The biggest concern IMO is how good the open weight models coming out of China are, on consumer hardware. But as long as OpenAI remains the go-to for the average consumer, they’ll be fine.

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

#232

Post by joering2 »

epolanski wrote: post #221
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…

I've seen some OpenAI ads on Italian tv and they made no sense to me, they tried hard to be apple like, but realistically nobody knew what they were about.

Italian advertising is weird in general. Month ago leaving Venice we pulled over on a gas station and I started just going thru pages on some magazine. At some point I see advertising on what looks like old fashioned shoes - and owner of the company holding his son with sign "from generation to generation". Only thing - the ~3 year old boy is completely naked wearing only shoes with his little pee pee sticking out. It shocked me and unsure if it was just my American domestication or there was really something wrong with it. I took a picture and wanted to send it to my friends in USA to show them how Italian advertising looks like, before getting sweats that if I were caught with that picture in the US, I would get in some deep trouble. I quickly deleted it, just in case. Crazy story..

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

#233

Post by epolanski »

rester324 wrote: post #227
epolanski wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

50x devs are not a myth. In any case the talent is very scarce in AI/ML, the one able to push through good ideas so prices are going to be high for years.

I think there is no evidence of any type of 50x devs. There is not even proof of 10x devs. So if there is no evidence, why is that not a myth?

Of course there is.

There's always individuals, developers or not, whose impact is 50 times greater than the average.

And the impact is measured financially, meaning, how much money you make.

If I find a way to solve an issue in a warehouse sparing the company from having to hire 70 people (that's not a made up number but a real example I've seen), your impact is in the multiple millions, the guy being tasked with delivering tables from some backoffice in the same company is obviously returning fractions of the same productivity.

Salvatore Sanfilippo, the author of Redis, alone, built a database that killed companies with hundreds of (brilliant) engineers.

Approaching the problems differently allowed him to scale to levels that huge teams could not, and the impact on $ was enormous.

Not only that but you can have negative x engineers. Those that create plenty of work, gaslighting and creating issues and slowing entire teams and organizations.

If you don't believe in NX developers or individuals that's a you problem, they exist in sports or any other field where single individuals can have impact hundreds of thousands or millions of times more positive than the average one.

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

#234

Post by ares623 »

gizajob wrote: post #156
myth_drannon wrote: post #14

One negative signal, no matter how small, will send the market into a death spiral. That will happen in a matter of hours.

There’s been loads of these signals and the market keeps ignoring them.

Because everyone knows that there’s no where else to go.

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

#235

Post by rester324 »

lovecg wrote: post #105
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.

Do other professionals (lawyers, finance etc.) argue for reducing their own compensation with the same fervor that software engineers like to do? The market is great for us, let’s enjoy it while it lasts. The alternative is all those CEOs colluding and pushing the wages down, why is that any better?

Mmmmhm. You could have made this argument about 2 years ago, and it would have been credible. But you are making this argument now, when literally hundreds of thousands of engineers are let go in the last few years just in the US alone...? I am not sure how such an argument holds up in such circumstances...

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

#236

Post by hyperbovine »

potatolicious wrote: post #111
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?

Yep, we are (unfortunately) still running on railroad infrastructure built a century ago. The amortization periods on that spending is ridiculously long. Effectively every single H100 in existence now will be e-waste in 5 years or less. Not exactly railroad infrastructure here, or even dark fiber.

> Effectively every single H100 in existence now will be e-waste in 5 years or less.

This is definitely not true, the A100 came out just over 5 years ago and still goes for low five figures used on eBay.

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

#237

Post by digdugdirk »

vitaflo wrote: post #219
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.

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.

But it does involve a ton of commercial real estate investment, as well as a huge shakeup in the energy market. People may not lose their homes, but we'll all be paying for this one way or another.

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

#238

Post by epolanski »

joering2 wrote: post #232
epolanski wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen some OpenAI ads on Italian tv and they made no sense to me, they tried hard to be apple like, but realistically nobody knew what they were about.

Italian advertising is weird in general. Month ago leaving Venice we pulled over on a gas station and I started just going thru pages on some magazine. At some point I see advertising on what looks like old fashioned shoes - and owner of the company holding his son with sign "from generation to generation". Only thing - the ~3 year old boy is completely naked wearing only shoes with his little pee pee sticking out. I…

Nudity in general is not weird in Europe, let alone children's.

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

#239

Post by iambateman »

nojs wrote: post #231

I think people are massively underestimating the money they will come from ads in the future. They generated $4.3B in revenue without any advertising program to monetise their 700 million weekly active users, most of whom use the free product. Google earns essentially all of its revenue from ads, $264B in 2024. ChatGPT has more consumer trust than Google at this point, and numerous ways of inserting sponsored results…

I think this is directionally right but to nitpick…Google has way more trust than OpenAI right now and it’s not close.

Acceleration is felt, not velocity.

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