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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

#271

Post by bcrl »

zdragnar wrote: post #244
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…

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.

This! The cost of training models inevitably goes down over time as FLOPS/$ and PB/$ increases relentlessly thanks to the exponential gains of Moore's law. Eventually we will end up with laptops and phones being Good Enough to run models locally. Once that happens, any competitor in the space that decides to actively support running locally will have operating costs that are a mere fraction of OpenAI's current business.

The pop of this bubble is going to be painful for a lot of people. Being too early to a market is just as bad as being too late, especially for something that can become a commodity due to a lack of moat.

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

#272

Post by CompoundEyes »

Analemma_ wrote: post #100
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?

Exactly: when was the last time you used ChatGPT-3.5? Its value deprecated to zero after, what, two-and-a-half years? (And the Nvidia chips used to train it have barely retained any value either) The financials here are so ugly: you have to light truckloads of money on fire forever just to jog in place.

A really did few days ago gpt-3.5-fast is a great model for certain tasks and cost wise via the API. Lots of solutions being built on the today’s latest are for tomorrow’s legacy model — if it works just pin the version.

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

#273

Post by fzzzy »

zdragnar wrote: post #244
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…

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.

brand recognition

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

#274

Post by brandon272 »

rdtsc wrote: post #91
infecto wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does DeepSeek have any market penetration in the US? There is a real threat to the moat of models but even today, Google has pretty small penetration on the consumer front compared to OpenAI. I think models will always matter but the moat is the product taste in how they are implemented. Imo from a consumer perspective, OAI has been doing well in this space.

> Does DeepSeek have any market penetration in the US? Does Google? What about Meta? Claude is popular with developers, too. Amazon? There I am not sure what they are doing with the LLMs. ("Alexa, are you there?"). I guess they are just happy selling shovels, that's good enough too. The point is not that everyone is throwing away their ChatGPT subscriptions and getting DeepSeek, the point is that DeepSeek was the fir…

> The point is not that everyone is throwing away their ChatGPT subscriptions and getting DeepSeek

Currently.

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

#275

Post by anthem2025 »

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?

[dead]

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

#276

Post by rdtsc »

brandon272 wrote: post #274
rdtsc wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does DeepSeek have any market penetration in the US? Does Google? What about Meta? Claude is popular with developers, too. Amazon? There I am not sure what they are doing with the LLMs. ("Alexa, are you there?"). I guess they are just happy selling shovels, that's good enough too. The point is not that everyone is throwing away their ChatGPT subscriptions and getting DeepSeek, the point is that DeepSeek was the fir…

> The point is not that everyone is throwing away their ChatGPT subscriptions and getting DeepSeek Currently.

Exactly, right? It went from "OpenAI seems like years ahead" to "well, maybe if DeepSeek can do it so can we, let's try".

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

#277

Post by syntaxing »

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…

They should be concerned with open weight models that don’t run on consumer hardware. The larger models from Qwen (Qwen Max) and ZLM (GLM and GLM air) perform not too far from Claude Sonnet 4 and GPT-5. ZLM offers a $3 plan that is decently generous. I can pretty much replace it over Sonnet 4 in Claude Code (I swear, Anthropic has been nerfing Sonnet 4 for people on the Pro plan).

You can run Qwen3-coder for free upto 1000 requests a day. Admittedly not state of the art but works as good of 5o-mini

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

#278

Post by croes »

_e8at wrote: post #270
zdragnar wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's Sam. From what I understand he was the only one crazy enough to demand hundreds of GPUs for months to get ChatGPT going. Which at the time sounded crazy. So yeah Sam is the guy with the guts and vision to stay ahead.

OpenAI isn't ahead

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

#279

Post by anonymousiam »

iambateman wrote: post #239
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.

I agree with you, and my impression of the trust-level of Google is pretty much zero.

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

#280

Post by skanaley »

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…

"Please help me with my factorial homework."

  buyACoke 0        = 1
  buyACoke rightNow = youShould * buyACoke (rightNow `at` walmart)
    where
      youShould = rightNow
      at        = (-)
      walmart   = 1
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