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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

#341

Post by zdragnar »

nojs wrote: post #293
zdragnar wrote: post #244

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 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?

Google got a massive leg up on the rest be having a better service. When Bing first came out, I was not impressed with what I got, and never really bothered going back to it.

Search quality isn't what it used to be, but the inertia is still paying dividends. That same inertia also applied to Google ads.

I'm not nearly so convinced OpenAI has the same leg up with ChatGPT. ChatGPT hasn't become a verb quite like google or Kleenex, and it isn't an indispensable part of a product.

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

#343

Post by bad_haircut72 »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #307
deadbabe wrote: post #253

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.

Ok, but there will be users using even more insanely powerful datacenter computers that will be able to our-AI the local AI users.

Nvidia/Apple (hardware companies) are the only winner in this case

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

#344

Post by beeflet »

api wrote: post #261
deadbabe wrote: post #253

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.

It is just downloading a program and using it

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

#345

Post by senordevnyc »

Havoc wrote: post #101
indymike wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but rather that they're doing that while Chinese competitors are releasing models in vaguely similar ballpark under Apache license. The LLM isn't 100% of the product... the open source is just part. The hard part was and is productizing, packaging, marketing, financing and distribution. A model by itself is just one part of the puzzle, free or otherwise. In other words, my uncle Bill and my mother can and do use Ch…

>my uncle Bill and my mother can and do use ChatGPT. They have the name brand for sure. And that is worth a lot. Notice how Deepseek went from a nobody to making mainstream news though. The only thing people like more than a trusted thing is being able to tell their friends about this amazing cheap good alternative they "discovered". It's good to be #1 mind share wise but without network effect that still leave you v…

I know almost no one outside of tech who has used anything other than ChatGPT. And I know few people under 65 who aren’t using ChatGPT.

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

#346

Post by misiti3780 »

throwacct wrote: post #48

At this point, every LLM startup out there is just trying to stay in the game long enough before VC money runs out or others fold. This is basically a war of attrition. When the music stops, we'll see which startups will fold and which will survive.

its like the ride sharing wars, except the valuations are an order of magnitude larger

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

#347

Post by Kranar »

hoppp wrote: post #336
nojs wrote: 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…

The moment they start mixing ads into responses Ill stop using them. Open models are good enough, its just more convenient to use chatgpt right now, but that can change.

People said the same thing about so many other online services since the 90s. The issue is that you're imagining ChatGPT as it exists right now with your current use case but just with ads inserted into their product. That's not really how these things go... instead OpenAI will wait until their product becomes so ingrained in everyday usage that you can't just decide to stop using them. It is possible, although not certain, that their product becomes ubiquitous and using LLMs someway somehow just becomes a normal way of doing your job, or using your computer, or performing menial and ordinary tasks. Using an LLM will be like using email, or using Google maps, or some other common tool we don't think much of.

That's when services start to insert ads into their product.

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

#349

Post by JumpCrisscross »

hoppp wrote: post #336
nojs wrote: 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…

The moment they start mixing ads into responses Ill stop using them. Open models are good enough, its just more convenient to use chatgpt right now, but that can change.

> moment they start mixing ads into responses Ill stop using them

Do you currently pay for it?

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

#350

Post by josvdwest »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #310
nojs wrote: 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 also wonder if this means that even paid tiers will get ads. Google's ad revenue is only ~$30 per user per year, yet there is no paid, ad-free Google Premium, even though lots of users would gladly pay way more than $30/year have an ad-free experience. There's no Google Premium because Google's ad revenue isn't uniformly distributed across users; it's heavily skewed towards the wealthiest users, exactly the users m…

Pretty sure the reason they don't have a paid tier is because engagement (and results) is better when you include ads. Like Facebook found in the early days
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