Live data from Hacker News

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

techinasia.com

291–300 of 720 posts

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

#291
post #270

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.

Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

You might see Sam as a Midas who can turn anything into gold. But history shows that very few people sustain that pattern.

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

#292

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.

[flagged]

[flagged]

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

#293
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.

It feels similar to Google to me - what is (was) their moat? Basically slightly better results and strong brand recognition. In the later days maybe privileged data access. But why does nobody use Bing?

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

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 upt…

I believe regular people will not change from chatGPT if it has some ads. I know people who use "alternative" wrappers that have ads because they aren't tech savvy, and I agree with the OP that this could be a significant amount of money We aren't 700 million people that use it.

Definitely don’t argue against that, once people get into a habit of using something, it takes quite a bit to get away from it. Just that an American startup can literally run ZLM models themselves (open weight with permissive license) as a competitor to ChatGPT is pretty wild to think about

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

#295
post #278
post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It is in terms of users. There's a lot of sticking power to "the thing you already know and use".

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

#296
post #270

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.

The shitcoin-in-return-for-your-iris-scans guy?

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

#297
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some will but you’re underestimating the burning desire to avoid IT and sysadmin work. Look at how much companies overspend on cloud just to not have to do IT work. They’d rather pay 10X-100X more to not have to admin stuff.

>"Look at how much companies overspend on cloud just to not have to do IT work."

I think they are doing it for a different reasons. Some are legit like renting this supercomputer for a day and some are like everybody else is doing it. I am friends with the small company owner and they have sysadmin who picks nose and does nothing and then they pay a fortune to Amazon

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

#298
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 really don't trust either. Google because of what they've already done, OpenAI because it has a guy at the helm who doesn't know how to spell the word 'ethics'.

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

#299
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…

Are they currently adding affiliate links to their outbound Amazon product links?

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

#300
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google and trust are an oxymoron

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

And to charge you for stuff you don't want and don't need as if you are using it every day through tied sales. Hm... wasn't that illegal?

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tiedselling.asp

Post reply on HN