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

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

#301

The best case I can see is they integrate shopping and steal the best high-intent cash cow commercial queries from G. It's not really about AI, it's about who gets to be the next toll road.

Google already puts AI summaries at the top of search. It would be trivial for them to incorporate shopping. And they have infinitely more traffic than OpenAI does. I just don’t see how OpenAI could possibly compete with that. What are you seeing that I’m not?

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

#302
I think I super important aspect that people are overlooking, is that every VC wants to invest in the next "big" AI company, and the probability is in your favor to only give funding to AI companies, bc any one of them could be the next big thing. I think, with a downturn of VC investment, we will see some more investment in companies that arent AI native, but use AI as a tool in the toolbox to deliver insights.

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

#303
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,…

There is a pretty big moat for Google: extreme amounts of video data on their existing services and absolutely no dependence on Nvidia and it's 90% margin.

Agreed. Even xAI's (Grok's) access to live data on x.com and millions of live video inputs from Tesla is a moat not enjoyed by OpenAI.

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

#305
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?

If the “moat” is not AI technology itself but merely sufficient other lines of business to deploy it well, then that’s further evidence that venture investments in AI startups will yield very poor returns.

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

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Microsoft shareholders aren't quite that dumb.

If they aren't dumb, why are they investing in MSFT now then if it's a bubble that's doomed to fail? And even in the worst case scenario, a 10-15% decline in the S&P 500 won't trigger the next Great Depression. (Keep in mind that we already had a ~20% drawdown in public equities during the interest rate hikes of 2022/2023 and the economy remained pretty robust throughout.)

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

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think many of them will want to, though. I think as long as Nvidia/AMD/other hardware providers offer inference hardware at prices decent enough to not justify building a chip in-house, most companies won't. Some of them will probably experiment, although that will look more like a small team of researchers + a moderate budget rather than a burn-the-ships we're going to use only our own hardware approach.

Well, anthropic just purchased a million TPUs from Google because even with a healthy margin from Google, it's far more cost effective because of Nvidia's insane markup. That speaks for itself. Nvidia will not drop their margin because it will tank their stock price. it's half of the reason for all this circular financing - lowering their effective margin without lowering it on paper.

And, don't forget everyone's buying from TSMC in every case!

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

#309
post #271
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,…

People seem to have the assumption that OpenAI and Anthropic dying would be synonymous with AI dying, and that's not the case. OpenAI and Anthropic spent a lot of capital on important research, and if the shareholders and equity markets cannot learn to value and respect that and instead let these companies die, new companies will be formed with the same tech, possibly by the same general group of people, thrive, and…

You weren’t around pre Google were you? The only thing Google learned from other search engines is what not to do - like rank based on the number of times a keyword appeared and not to use expensive bespoked servers

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

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Microsoft shareholders aren't quite that dumb. If they aren't dumb, why are they investing in MSFT now then if it's a bubble that's doomed to fail? And even in the worst case scenario, a 10-15% decline in the S&P 500 won't trigger the next Great Depression. (Keep in mind that we already had a ~20% drawdown in public equities during the interest rate hikes of 2022/2023 and the economy remained pretty robust througho…

Like I said, they aren't "that" dumb. They are playing a risky game, but when they see the number go down rapidly they will pull. Which will make the line go down even faster.

>And even in the worst case scenario, a 10-15% decline in the S&P 500 won't trigger the next Great Depression

Only if you believe the 10% decline won't domino and that the S&P500 is secluded from the rest of the global economy. I wish I shared your optimism.

> and the economy remained pretty robust throughout.

Yeah and we voted the person who orchestrated that out. We don't have the money to pump trillions back in a 2nd time in such a short time. Something's gonna give, and soon.

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