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OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

economist.com

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Re: OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

#291

Post by Davidzheng »

avalys wrote: post #139

AI is going to be a highly-competitive, extremely capital-intensive commodity market that ends up in a race to the bottom competing on cost and efficiency of delivering models that have all reached the same asymptotic performance in the sense of intelligence, reasoning, etc. The simple evidence for this is that everyone who has invested the same resources in AI has produced roughly the same result. OpenAI, Anthropic,…

Um meta didn't achieve the same results yet. And does it matter if they can all achieve the same results if they all manage high enough payoffs? I think subscription based income is only the beginning. Next stage is AI-based subcompanies encroaching on other industries (e.g. deepmind's drug company)

Re: OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

#292

Post by MangoToupe »

heavyset_go wrote: post #284
johnnyanmac wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It did. I question the issue of "what problem am I trying to solve" with AI, though. Transportation across a huge swath of land had a clear problem space, and trains offered a very clear solution; created dedicated railing and you can transport 100x the resources at 10x the speed of a horseman (and I'm probably underselling these gains). In times where trekking across a continent took months, the efficiencies in comm…

> AI feels like a solution looking for a problem. The problem is increasing profits by replacing paid labor with something "good enough".

This is a use case that hasn't yet been proven out, though. "Good enough" for an executive may not be "good enough" to keep the company solvent, and there's no shortage of private equity morons who have no understanding of their own assets.

Re: OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

#293

Post by websiteapi »

famouswaffles wrote: post #241
doctaj wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Google AI products do people not want to use? Gemini is catching up to chatpt from a MAU perspective, ai overviews in search are super popular and staggeringly more used than any other ai-based product out there, a Google ai mode has decent usage, and Google Lens has surprisingly high usage. These products together dwarf everyone else out there by like 10x.

>Gemini is catching up to chatpt from a MAU perspective It is far behind, and GPT hasn't exactly stopped growing either. Weekly Active Users, Monthly visits...Gemini is nowhere near. They're comfortably second, but second is still well below first. >ai overviews in search are super popular and staggeringly more used than any other ai-based product out there Is it ? How would you even know ? It's a forced feature you…

we're curious what your source is

Re: OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

#294

Post by jfrbfbreudh »

avalys wrote: post #139

AI is going to be a highly-competitive, extremely capital-intensive commodity market that ends up in a race to the bottom competing on cost and efficiency of delivering models that have all reached the same asymptotic performance in the sense of intelligence, reasoning, etc. The simple evidence for this is that everyone who has invested the same resources in AI has produced roughly the same result. OpenAI, Anthropic,…

Google’s moat:

Try “@gmail” in Gemini

Google’s surface area to apply AI is larger than any other company’s. And they have arguably the best multimodal model and indisputably the best flash model?

Re: OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

#295

Post by Davidzheng »

adriand wrote: post #30

This article doesn’t add anything to what we know already. It’s still an open question what happens with the labs this coming year, but I personally think Anthropic’s focus on coding represents the clearest path to subscriber-based success (typical SaaS) whereas OpenAI has a clear opportunity with advertising. Both of these paths could be very lucrative. Meanwhile I expect Google will continue to struggle with making…

There are other avenues of income. You can invade other industries which are slow on AI uptake and build an AI-from-ground competitor with large advantages over peers. There are hints of this (not AI-from-ground but with more AI) with deepmind's drug research labs. But this can be a huge source of income. You can kill entire industries which inevitably cannot incorporate AI as fast as AI companies can internally.

Re: OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

#297

Post by johnnyanmac »

OGEnthusiast wrote: post #281
johnnyanmac wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I know this is the latest catastrophizion meme for AI companies, but what is it even supposed to mean? Someone else put it succintly. "When A million dollar company fails, it's their problem. When a billion dollar company fails, it's our problem" In essence, there's so much investment in AI that it's a significant part of the US GDP. If AI falters, that is something that the entire stock market will feel, and by eff…

OpenAI isn't a publicly-traded company though, how will it going to zero affect the stock market?

OpenAI collapses and MSFT tanks. Microsoft shareholders aren't quite that dumb.

And that's ignoring the dominoes of other AI firms being pulled out of because OpenAi falters.

Re: OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

#298

Post by nubg »

gridspy wrote: post #239
harrall wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use both and ChatGPT will absolutely glaze me. I will intentionally say some BS and ChatGPT will say “you’re so right.” It will hilariously try to make me feel good. But Gemini will put me in my place. Sometimes I ask my question to Gemini because I don’t trust ChatGPT’s affirmations. Truthfully I just use both.

I told ChatGPT via my settings that I often make mistakes and to call out my assumptions. So now it 1. Glazes me 2. Lists a variety of assumptions (some can be useful / interesting) Answers the question At least this way I don't spend a day pursuing an idea the wrong way because ChatGPT never pointed out something obvious.

Care to share the system prompt?

Re: OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

#299

Post by nubg »

andrekandre wrote: post #186
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who wants to copy&paste prompts between ai agents? An AI! The specialist vs generalist debate is still open. And for complex problems, sure, having a model that runs on a small galaxy may be worth it. But for most tasks, a fleet of tailor-made smaller models being called on by an agent seems like a solidly-precedented (albeit not singularity-triggering) bet.

> But for most tasks, a fleet of tailor-made smaller models being called on by an agent seems like a solidly-precedented (albeit not singularity-triggering) bet. not an expert by any means, but wouldn't smaller but highly refined models also output more reproducible results? intuitively it sounds akin to the unix model...

But then again the main selling point of using LLMs as part of some code that solves a certain business need is that you don't have to finetune a usecase-specific model (like in the mid 2010s), you just prompt engineer a bit and it often magically works.

Re: OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

#300

Post by wrs »

bdangubic wrote: post #217
margalabargala wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's in Nvidia's interest to charge the absolute maximum they can without their customers failing. Every dollar of Nvidia's margin is your own lost margin. Utilities don't do that. Nvidia is objectively a way bigger liability than electricity rates.

it is in every business’s best interest to charge the maximum…

Utilities and insurance companies are two examples of business regulated to not charge the maximum, for public policy reasons.
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