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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

#361

Post by nickff »

grogers wrote: post #355
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why would it be any different for youtube premium? I think Google just doesn't think enough people will pay for ad-free search, not that it would cannibalize their ad revenue.

YouTube's ads are much lower-cost than the 'premium' AdWords ones, because the 'intent' is lower, and targeting is worse.

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

#362

Post by asa400 »

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…

What is OpenAI's competitive moat? There's no product stickiness here.

What prevents people from just using Google, who can build AI stuff into their existing massive search/ads/video/email/browser infrastructure?

Normal, non-technical users can't tell the difference between these models at all, so their usage numbers are highly dependent on marketing. Google has massive distribution with world-wide brands that people already know, trust, and pay for, especially in enterprise.

Google doesn't have to go to the private markets to raise capital, they can spend as much of their own money as they like to market the living hell out of this stuff, just like they did with Chrome. The clock is running on OpenAI. At some point OpenAI's investors are going to want their money back.

I'm not saying Google is going to win, but if I had to bet on which company's money runs out faster, I'm not betting against Google.

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

#363

Post by typpilol »

zdragnar wrote: post #341
nojs wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I actually find bing better now for more technical searches.

Most technical Google searches end up at win fourms or official Microsoft support site which is basically just telling you that running sfc scannow for everything is the fix.

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

#364

Post by muzani »

idiotsecant wrote: post #322
muzani wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're the only ones making AI with a personality. Yeah, you don't need chocolate flavored protein shakes but if I'm taking it every day, I get sick of the vanilla flavor.

Huh? They're actively removing personality from current models as much as possible.

Did you mean the GPT-5 launch? They put it back in within 2 weeks, despite the side effects and bugs. It was pretty clear that it's their value proposition.

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

#365

Post by abnercoimbre »

Kranar wrote: post #347
hoppp wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

And if/when they reach that point, the average consumer will see the ad as an irksome fly. That's it.

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

#366

Post by alex43578 »

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…

"Lots of users would gladly pay way more than $30/year have an ad-free experience"? Outside of ads embedded in Google Maps, a free and simple install of Ublock Origin essentially eliminates ads in Search, YouTube, etc. I'd expect that just like Facebook, people would be very unwilling to pay for Google to eliminate ads, since right now they aren't even willing to add a browser extension.

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

#367

Post by EasyMark »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #75

Everyone is trying to compare AI companies with something that happened in the past, but I don't think we can predict much from that. GPUs are not railroads or fiber optics. The cost structure of ChatGPT and other LLM based services is entirely different than web, they are very expensive to build but also cost a lot to serve. Companies like Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Google would all survive if their massive investment…

In the end Revenues > Costs or you have an issue. That "startup" money will eventually be gone, and you're back to MIMO Money In vs Money Out and if it's not > , you will go bankrupt.

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

#368

Post by jcranmer »

9rx wrote: post #176
palmotea wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That which survived, at least. A whole lot of rail infrastructure was not viable and soon became waste of its own. There was, at one time, ten rail lines around my parts, operated by six different railway companies. Only one of them remains fully intact to this day. One other line retained a short section that is still standing, which is now being used for car storage, but was mostly dismantled. The rest are comple…

> How long did it take for 9 out of 10 of those rail lines to become nonviable? Records from the time are few and far between, but, from what I can tell, it looks like they likely weren't ever actually viable. The records do show that the railways were profitable for a short while, but it seems only because the government paid for the infrastructure. If they had to incur the capital expenditure themselves, the math d…

> The records do show that the railways were profitable for a short while, but it seems only because the government paid for the infrastructure. If they had to incur the capital expenditure themselves, the math doesn't look like it would math.

Actually, governments in the US rarely actually provided any capital to the railroads. (Some state governments did provide some of the initial capital for the earliest railroads). Most of federal largess to the railroads came in the form of land grants, but even the land grant system for the railroads was remarkably limited in scope. Only about 7-8% of the railroad mileage attracted land grants.

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

#369

Post by fspeech »

asa400 wrote: post #362
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…

What is OpenAI's competitive moat? There's no product stickiness here. What prevents people from just using Google, who can build AI stuff into their existing massive search/ads/video/email/browser infrastructure? Normal, non-technical users can't tell the difference between these models at all, so their usage numbers are highly dependent on marketing. Google has massive distribution with world-wide brands that peopl…

Chats have contexts. While search engines try to track you it is spookier because it is unclear to the user how the contexts are formed. In chats at least the contexts are transparent to both the provider and the user.

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

#370

Post by nick__m »

spiderice wrote: post #164
whizzter wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think OpenAI just added some shopping stuff to start enshittificatio^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmonetization of ChatGPT.

Apparently ^H is a shortcut for backspace. Good to know!

it's because ^ represents the CTRL key. In ASCII, CTRl subtract 0x40, H is 0x48 and backspace is 0x08...
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