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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

#241

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.

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

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

I asked if you can prove there are 10x or 50x programmers. You shared anecdotes and theories. I will rather wait until you share some evidence.

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

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost of old models decreases a lot, but the cost of frontier models, what people use 99% of the time, is hardly decreasing. Plus, many of the best models rely on thinking or reasoning, which use 10-100x as many tokens for the same prompt. That doesn't work on a fixed cost monthly subscription.

im not sure that you read what i just said. Almost no one using chatgpt would care if they were still talking to gpt5 2 years from now. If compute per watt doubles in the next 2 years, then the cost of serving gpt5 just got cut in half. purely on the hardware side, not to mention we are getting better at making smaller models smarter.

I don't really believe that premise in a world with competition, and the strategy it supports -- let AI companies produce profit off of old models -- ignores the need for SOTA advancement and expansion by these very same companies.

In other words, yes GPT-X might work well enough for most people, but the newer demo for ShinyNewModelZ is going to pull customers of GPT-X's in regardless of both fulfilling the customer needs. There is a persistent need for advancement (or at least marketing that indicates as much) in order to have positive numbers at the end of the churn cycle.

I have major doubts that can be done without trying to push features or SOTA models, without just straight lying or deception.

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

#244
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…

What is OpenAI's moat? There's plenty of competitors running their own models and tools. Sure, they have the ChatGPT name, but I don't see them massively out-competing the entire market unless the future model changes drastically improve over the 3->4->5 trajectory.

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

#245
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 don’t pay $200 per month to use a product tightly coupled for ad revenue (ahem tracking).

That’s why I use Kagi, Hey, Telegram, Apple (for now) etc.

I really hope OpenAI can build a sustainable model which is not based on that.

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

#246
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…

> But as long as OpenAI remains the go-to for the average consumer, they be fine.

This is like the argument of a couple of years ago "as long as Tesla remains ahead of the Chinese technology...". OpenAI can definitely become a profitable company but I dont see anything to say they will have a moat and monopoly.

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

#247
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.

Google and trust are an oxymoron

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

#248
post #245
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 don’t pay $200 per month to use a product tightly coupled for ad revenue (ahem tracking). That’s why I use Kagi, Hey, Telegram, Apple (for now) etc. I really hope OpenAI can build a sustainable model which is not based on that.

I suspect ads would be an attempt to monetize the free users not people paying $200/mo for Pro. Though who knows...

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

#249
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How long did it take for 9 out of 10 of those rail lines to become nonviable? Records from the time are few and far between, but, from what I can tell, it looks like they likely weren't ever actually viable. The records do show that the railways were profitable for a short while, but it seems only because the government paid for the infrastructure. If they had to incur the capital expenditure themselves, the math d…

Railroads were pretty profitable for a long time. The western long haul routes were capitalized by land transfers. What killed them was the same thing that killed marine shipping — the government put the thumb on the scale for trucking and cars to drive postwar employment and growth of suburbs, accelerate housing development, and other purposes.

> the government put the thumb on the scale for trucking and cars to drive postwar employment and growth of suburbs, accelerate housing development, and other purposes.

The age of postwar suburb growth would be more commonly attributed to WWII, but the records show these railroads were already losing money hand over fist by the WWI era. The final death knell, if there ever was one, was almost certainly the Great Depression.

But profitable and viable are not one and the same, especially given the immense subsidies at play. You can make anything profitable when someone else is covering the cost.

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

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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They're not claiming that it's like the dot com boom because no one is actually making money. They're claiming that this is more like the dot com boom than the housing bubble, which I think is true. The dot com crash didn't cause Jane-on-the-street to lose her house while she worked a factory job, though the housing crisis did have those kinds of consumer-affecting outcomes.
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