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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

#351

Post by ljlolel »

vkou wrote: post #290
gerdesj wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly is "second" place? No-one really knows what first place looks like. Everyone is certain that it will cost an arm, a leg and most of your organs. For me, I think that, the possible winners will be close to fully funded up front and the losers will be trying to turn debt into profit and fail. The rest of us self hoster types are hoping for a massive glut of GPUs and RAM to be dumped in a global fire sale.…

You and the other hobbyists aren't what's driving valuations. Enterprise subscriptions are.

OpenAI is 80% consumer subs

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

#352

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

dheera wrote: post #348
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I was around pre-Google. Ranking was Google's 5% contribution to it. They stood on the shoulders of people who invented physical server and datacenter infrastructure, Unix/Linux, file systems, databases, error correction, distributed computing, the entire internet infrastructure, modern Ethernet, all kinds of stuff.

And none of that had to do with learning from other search engines…

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

#353

Post by DoesntMatter22 »

simonsarris wrote: post #265
fooblaster wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google has several enviable, if not moats, at least redoubts. TPUs, mass infrastructure and own their own cloud services, they own delivery mechanisms on mobile (Android) and every device (Chrome). And Google and Youtube are still #1 and #2 most visited websites in the world.

They also have one of the biggest negatives in that they abandon almost everything they build so it’s hard to get invested in thier products.

I agree with the rest though

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

#354

Post by famouswaffles »

websiteapi wrote: post #342
famouswaffles wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monthly Visits (chatGPT #5, Gemini #26): https://www.similarweb.com/blog/research/market-research/mos... Search Traffic: https://x.com/Similarweb/status/2003078223135990246

doesn't seem accurate since gemini has many entry points

Entry points ? The visits are accurate for the website and app. If you're talking about AI overviews, then that's meaningless for reasons I've already explained.

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

#355

Post by why-o-why »

xivzgrev wrote: post #283
simonsarris wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has several enviable, if not moats, at least redoubts. TPUs, mass infrastructure and own their own cloud services, they own delivery mechanisms on mobile (Android) and every device (Chrome). And Google and Youtube are still #1 and #2 most visited websites in the world.

Not to mention security. I'd trust Google more not to have a data breach than open AI / whomever. Email accounts are hugely valuable but I haven't seen a Google data breach in the 20+ years I've been using them. This matters because I don't want my chats out there in public. Also integration with other services. I just had Gemini summarize the contents of a Google Drive folder and it was effortless & effective

Is Google even required to inform you of a data breach?

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

#356

Post by why-o-why »

nateb2022 wrote: post #168
fooblaster wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have yet to be convinced the broader population has an appetite for AI produced cinematography or videos. Independence from Nvidia is no more of a liability than dependence on electricity rates; it's not as if it's in Nvidia's interest to see one of its large customers fail. And pretty much any of the other Mag7 companies are capable of developing in-house TPUs + are already independently profitable, so Google isn'…

Given the fact that Apple and Coke but rushed to produce AI slop, and the agreements with Disney, we are going to see a metric fuck-ton of AI-generated cinema in the next decade. The broader population's tastes are absolute harbage when it comes to cinema, so I don't see why you need convincing. 40+ superhero films should be enough.

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

#357

Post by conception »

password54321 wrote: post #49

Not sure why they put so much investment into videoSlop and imageSlop. Anthropic seems to be more focused at least.

When they released their first good image model is when they got a new 100 million users in a week.

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

#358

Post by BenFranklin100 »

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,…

I’m waiting to get an RTX 5090 on the cheap.

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

#359

Post by aenis »

odo1242 wrote: post #245
Ginden wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because almost everyone involved in AI race grew up in "winner takes it all" environments, typical for software, and they try really hard to make it reality. This means your model should do everything to just take 90% of market share, or at least 90% of specific niche. The problem is, they can't find the moat, despite searching very hard, whatever you bake into your AI, your competitors will be able to replicate in f…

It's also why they bought 40% of the world's RAM supply, too

Committed to buying. They dont have the money to actually buy it (at least not yet).

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

#360

Post by 578_Observer »

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,…

The "Railway Bubble" analogy is spot on.

As a loan officer in Japan who remembers the 1989 bubble, I see the same pattern. In the traditional "Shinise" world I work with, Cash is Oxygen. You hoard it to survive the inevitable crash. For OpenAI, Cash is Rocket Fuel. They are burning it all to reach "escape velocity" (AGI) before gravity kicks in.

In 1989, we also bet that land prices would outrun gravity forever. But usually, Physics (and Debt) wins in the end. When the railway bubble bursts, only those with "Oxygen" will survive.

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