$2.5B in stock comp for about 3,000 employees. that’s roughly $830k per person in just six months. Almost 60% of their revenue went straight back to staff.
That’s how it should be, spread the wealth.
To the top 1%.
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
#32You can now buy stuff from chatgpt as they have started showing ads in their search results. That's a source of revenue right there.
Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss
#33You can now buy stuff from chatgpt as they have started showing ads in their search results. That's a source of revenue right there.
Is that true? I heard that they've integrated checkout, but I didn't know they had ads.
Here's information about checkout inside ChatGPT: https://openai.com/index/buy-it-in-chatgpt/
Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss
#34I'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 licensed competition.
I suspect that's why the SORA release has social media style vibes. Seeking network effects to fix this strategic dilemma.
To be clear I still think they're #1 technically...but the gap feels too small strategically. And they know it. That recent pivot to a linkedin competitor? SORA with socials? They're scrambling on market fit even though they lead on tech
Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss
#35This link appears to be dead. Do we have a healthy source?
Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss
#36Earlier 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.
The 50x distinguished engineer is real though. Companies and fortunes are won and lost on strategic decisions.
Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss
#37> US$2.5 billion on stock-based compensation um...
Never having worked for a company in a position like OpenAI, how does this manifest in the real world as actual comp? Like I get 50,000 shares deposited in to my Fidelity account, worth $2 each, but i can't sell them or do anything with them?
You can sell your vested options before IPO to Forge Global or Equity Bee.
Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss
#38These numbers are pretty ugly. You always expect new tech to operate at a loss initially but the structure of their losses is not something one easily scales out of. In fact it gets more painful as they scale. Unless something fundamentally changes and fast this is gonna get ugly real quick.
There is an exceptionally obvious solution for OpenAI & ChatGPT: ads. In fact it's an unavoidable solution. There is no future for OpenAI that doesn't involve a gigantic, highly lucrative ad network attached to ChatGPT. One of the dumbest things in tech at present is OpenAI not having already deployed this. It's an attitude they can't actually afford to maintain much longer. Ads are a hyper margin product that are ve…
> They would have to be the biggest fools in tech history to not flip that switch
As much as I don't want ads infiltrating this, it's inevitable and I agree. OpenAI could seriously put a dent into Google's ad monopoly here, Altman would be an absolute idiot to not take advantage of their position and do it.
If they don't, Google certainly will, as will Meta, and Microsoft.
I wonder if their plan for the weird Sora 2 social network thing is ads.
Investors are going to want to see some returns..eventually. They can't rely on daddy Microsoft forever either, now with MS exploring Claude for Copilot they seem to have soured a bit on OpenAI.
Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss
#39Earlier 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 not a myth and with how much productivity AI tools can give others, there can be an order of magnitude difference than outside of AI.
Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss
#40These numbers are pretty ugly. You always expect new tech to operate at a loss initially but the structure of their losses is not something one easily scales out of. In fact it gets more painful as they scale. Unless something fundamentally changes and fast this is gonna get ugly real quick.
they could keep the current model in chatGPT the same forver and 99% of users wouldnt know or care, and unless you think hardware isnt going to improve, the cost of that will basically decrease to 0.
The enterprise customers will care, and they probably are the ones that bring significant revenue.