OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss • Hacker News Board

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

#251

Post by rchaud » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 12:08 AM UTC

indymike wrote: post #63

Havoc wrote: post #34

I'd be pretty worried as a shareholder. Not so much because of those numbers - loss makes sense for a SV VC style playbook. ...but rather that they're doing that while Chinese competitors are releasing models in vaguely similar ballpark under Apache license. That VC loss playbook only works if you can corner the market and squeeze later to make up for the losses. And you don't corner something that has freakin apache…

> but rather that they're doing that while Chinese competitors are releasing models in vaguely similar ballpark under Apache license. The LLM isn't 100% of the product... the open source is just part. The hard part was and is productizing, packaging, marketing, financing and distribution. A model by itself is just one part of the puzzle, free or otherwise. In other words, my uncle Bill and my mother can and do use Ch…

> In other words, my uncle Bill and my mother can and do use ChatGPT

So what? DAUs don't mean anything if there isn't an ad product attached to it. Regular people aren't paying for ChatGPT, and even if they did, the price would need to be several multiples of what Netflix charges to break even.

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

#252

Post by typpilol » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 12:08 AM UTC

fxtentacle wrote: post #179

fooker wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Effectively every single H100 in existence now will be e-waste in 5 years or less. This remains to be seen. H100 is 3 years old now, and is still the workhorse of all the major AI shops. When there's something that is obviously better for training, these are still going to be used for inference. If what you say is true, you could find a A100 for cheap/free right now. But check out the prices.

Yeah, I can rent an A100 server for roughly the same price as what the electricity would cost me.

Where?

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

#253

Post by deadbabe » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 12:09 AM UTC

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…

In 10 years most serious users of AI will be using local LLMs on insanely powerful devices, with no ads. API based services will have limited horizon.

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

#254

Post by hu3 » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 12:10 AM UTC

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…

OpenAI keeps spamming me with ads on instagram and reddit.

Pretty sure I'm not a cheap audience to target ads at, for multiple reasons.

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

#255

Post by robertjpayne » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 12:12 AM UTC

Analemma_ wrote: post #78

JCM9 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fundamentally different business models. Amazon had huge capital investments that got less painful as it scaled. Amazon also focuses on cash flow vs profit. Even early on it generated a lot of cash, it just reinvested that back into the business which meant it made a “loss” on paper. OpenAI is very different. Their “capital” expense depreciation (model development) has a really ugly depreciation curve. It’s not like…

Not to mention nobody bothered chasing Amazon-- by the time potential competitors like Walmart realized what was up, it was way too late and Amazon had a 15-year head start. OpenAI had a head start with models for a bit, but now their models are basically as good (maybe a little better, maybe a little worse) than the ones from Anthropic and Google, so they can't stay still for a second. Not to mention switching costs…

This right here. AI has no moat and none of these companies has a product that isn't easily replaced by another provider.

Unless one of these companies really produces a leapfrog product or model that can't be replicated within a short timeframe I don't see how this changes.

Most of OpenAI's users are freeloaders and if they turn off the free plan they're just going to divert those users to Google.

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

#256

Post by piskov » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 12:12 AM UTC

nharada wrote: post #248

piskov wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

First, as an advertiser you want those sweet-sweet people with money.

Second, if they put “display: hidden” on ads doesn’t mean they will create and use entirely other architecture, data flow and storage, just for those pro users.

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

#257

Post by QuantumFunnel » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 12:13 AM UTC

piskov wrote: post #247

iambateman wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The only thing I trust google to do is abandon software and give me a terrible support experience

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

#258

Post by belval » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 12:13 AM UTC

munk-a wrote: post #27

darth_avocado wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have to compete with Zuckerberg throwing $100M comps to poach people. I think $830k per person is nothing in comparison.

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.

> it's insane that these companies aren't just training up more internally

Adding headcount to a fast growing company *to lower wages* is a sure way to kill your culture, lower the overall quality bar and increase communication overheads significantly.

Yes they are paying a lot of their employees and the pool will grow, but adding bodies to a team that is running well in hopes that it will automatically lead to a bump in productivity is the part that is insane. It never works.

What will happen is a completely new team (team B) will be formed and given ownership of a component that was previously owned by team A under the guise of "we will just agree on interfaces". Team B will start doing their thing and meeting with Team A representative regularly but integration issues will still arise, except that instead of a tight core of 10-20 developers, you now have 40. They will add a ticketing to track change better, now issues in Team's B service, which could have been addressed in an hour by the right engineer on team A, will take 3 days to get resolved as ticket get triaged/prioritized. Lo and behold, Team C as now appeared and will be owning a sub-component of Team B. Now when Team A has issue with Team B's service, they cut a ticket, but the oncall on Team B investigates and finds that it's actually an issue with Team C's service, they cut their own ticket.

Suddenly every little issue takes days and weeks to get resolved because the original core of 10-20 developers is no longer empowered to just move fast. They eventually leave because they feel like their impact and influence has diminished (Team C's manager is very good at politics), Team A is hollowed out and you now have wall-to-wall mediocrity with 120 headcounts and nothing is ever anyone's fault.

I had a director that always repeated that communication between N people is inherently N² and thus hiring should always weight in that the candidate being "good" is not enough, they have to pull their weight and make up for the communication overhead that they add to the team.

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

#259

Post by Rohansi » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 12:13 AM UTC

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…

It'll be interesting to see the effect ads have on their trustworthiness. There's potential for it to end up worse than Google because sponsored content can blend in better and possibly not be reliably disclosed.

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

#260

Post by epolanski » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 12:14 AM UTC

rester324 wrote: post #242

epolanski wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you don't see the evidence of different individuals having very different productivity in every field, including software, (measured in $/hr like every economist does btw) that's a you problem.

Of course different scientists with different backgrounds, professionalism, communication and leadership skills are going to have magnitude of orders different outputs and impacts in AI companies.

If you put me and Carmack in a game development team you can rest assured that he's going to have a 50/100x impact over me, not sure why would I even question it.

Not only his output will be vastly superior than mine, but his design choices, leadership and experience will save and compound infinite amounts of money and time. That's beyond obvious.