Earlier quoted context omitted.
More importanly they have moat
This. The fact that no one seems to understand that Anth and OAI don’t have a moat is beyond me.
Or they do. If their moat is so weak, where's Grok and Gemini in this race?
OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B
301–310 of 425 posts
Re: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone else will be 5% more productive. Then no one is "more" productive. So everyone has a higher output, but the same wages and hours worked. There was only a gap when usable AI first came out, some contractors could do the same quantity of work in less time and enjoy time off or do more jobs. Now the gap has closed or is closing. And using AI now is more about not being less productive than peers who do use it.
That's not how productivity works. It's not a zero-sum game. If all construction workers can build houses 5% more efficiently, that's not the same as nothing changing. Depending on supply and demand, it means 5% more houses are built, or houses are 5% cheaper, or maybe 5% bigger, or some combination. Whether or not the construction workers all get a raise or 5% get fired (or both) depends on that supply and demand, b…
Why would the company pay more when they can just not pay more? The only things I can see happening is they might lower prices as competition ramps up, or in general as there is more supply for the same cost.
Re: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uber’s situation was different, though. The reason Uber were bleeding money is because they purposefully made all their rides cheap to undercut the taxi businesses. People used Uber because it was cheaper than renting a taxi. Now you can’t really find taxis anywhere, even at airports it’s a lot more difficult than it used to be. Once the taxi business was disrupted enough, Uber’s pricing skyrocketed and customers had…
People use AI because it is cheaper than paying humans to think. Soon you won’t really be able to find human thinkers.
The hot-take that humans are going to stop thinking because of AI is the only convincing evidence of the idea i’ve come across so far.
Re: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B
#304Re: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
People use AI because it is cheaper than paying humans to think. Soon you won’t really be able to find human thinkers.
Some humans will need to interpret the thinking and apply it somewhere and take some responsibility for those decisions. If you think AI can do all that end to end it’s a different question but we’re nowhere near that right now.
Definitely, I’m not saying that AI can entirely replace humans. But AI is definitely replacing parts of many jobs. If AI companies raise their rates to be profitable, and it turns out that paying for profitable AI is not worth it vs paying for humans, that might be a sticky situation.
Re: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B
#306Suspicious lack of pro-AI comments here
It's the thing to do in HN comments. Downvote anything AI related and armchair diagnosing AI coding as psychosis. :/
Luckily, we've seen this before. Doom and gloom when smartphones came out. And then the same again when mobile development was preferred and there was an outcry from the web dev crowd and constant downvoting of phone apps.
Re: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B
#307The fact that people here are looking at these numbers and saying "this is fine" is absolutely bonkers. Basically, it's a company that's not sustainable for two separate reasons. The first one is that they have an extremely high overhead. SG&A of 55% is really bad. The seconds reason is that their R&D costs are truly astronomical. They could probably cut those costs to some extent, but they're not going to cut them t…
Yeah insane that people think it'll be okay in the long run but wondering how much different the financial status of other such company would be? Not much I guess.
I can't imagine there's a large variation in costs per token for inference and training costs between companies, and since they're all basically doing exactly the same thing, and competing on price... yeah.
Re: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
Before Uber did it, Amazon had been doing it for almost two decades. It's nothing new. There is a difference between 1 billion and 20 billion in losses, though. Amazon in, I forget, 2014? Ran a profitable quarter with I think $1 in profits, simply to prove they were in control of their finances, and "we can stop any time we want". Sam gets a lot of shade, but he's been around the YC block once or twice, I suspect wha…
Amazon structured their entire operation to look like this but as you indicated, could have switched to a porfit-making, dividen-paying company more than a decade ago, that just wasn't their strategy. The same can not be said for OpenAI. Even if they slashed their R&D, their marketing and sales costs are extremely high for a tech company. On paper they look more like a utility and those are not worth double-digit mul…
Looking at the fact that third parties are making a profit offering XYZ third party open models on OpenRouter, it stands to reason that OpenAI could turn off their R&D, marketing, hype jedi, legal departments and just sell GPT9.999 and turn a profit.
Again like in the Amazon analogy, I don't think they're done growing, and unfortunately, I think they've positioned themselves (perhaps intentionally) as too big to fail, and need to continue growth at all costs.
I'm glad I'm not OAI's CFO sounds like a stressful job trying to justify/account for whatever Sam says to the board, or whatever the board demands. Sam hasn't said hardly anything since about February so I'm guessing the CFO simply bends to the will of the board these days. But that's speculation.
Re: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
They haven't done humanity a favor at all. The innovation that these LLMs have produced has been small. A few fun math theorems where the answer was gleaned from a pattern in the training data. Great,.but it doesn't change the world one bit. That latest drug for pancreatic cancer? Yeah, all human. After the trillions already spent, AI hasn't come up with any new medications, no new inventions to save lives... Nothing
We're only a few years into it, and yet all generations of folks are using it for all kinds of things and getting joy out of it. That's positive impact. Even folks outside of tech are having fun with it. That is a positive change for humanity. Similar to Radio, TV, smartphones, internet, microwaves and PCs. It's already being used in the medical field in many different ways, and I believe it will be able to fold new…
They already fold proteins with simulations.
Just because people are using it doesn't mean it's a net good. Lots of people use social media and that's just rotting brains and making people far more polarized than they ever were before.
It's use in medicine hasn't resulted in anything meaningful. Nobody's medical bill has gotten cheaper and nobody has lived longer or healthier because of anything AI did.
Re: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're not really losing ground to Anthropic. 5.5 was a bit better than 4.8. Fable was good, and was a jump over 4.8, but only incremental over 5.5. Anthropic is also likely losing money, right?
I never get throttled by Codex at $20/mo however Claude throttles faster at same rate. I like Claude’s output in terms of code however
In other words, Codex likely has a lower demand:capacity ratio compared to Claude. Which can mean either OpenAI did a better job at building out capacity, or the demand for Claude outstripped Anthropic's projections. Or both.