Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

techinasia.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 720 posts

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

#371

Post by rajaman0 »

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…

Consumer brand quality is so massively underrated by tech people.

ChatGPT has a phenomenal brand. That's worth 100x more than "product stickiness". They have 700 million weekly users and growing much faster than Google.

I think your points on Google being well positioned are apt for capitalization reasons, but only one company has consumer mindshare on "AI" and its the one with "ai" in its name.

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

#372

Post by kristopolous »

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…

It's a distinctive brand, pleasant user experience, and a trustworthy product, like every other commodified technology on the planet.

That's all that matters now. We've passed the "good enough" bar for llms for the majority of consumer use cases.

From here out it's like selling cellphones and laptops

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

#373

Post by zahlman »

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…

> $264B in 2024.

Why is this much money spent on advertising? Surely it isn't really justified by increase in sales that could be attributed to the ads? You're telling me people actually buy these ridiculous products I see advertised?

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

#374

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

alex43578 wrote: post #366
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…

"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.

It worked for YouTube, I don’t see why the assumption of paid gpt models will follow google and not YouTube, particularly when users are conditioned to pay for gpt already.

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

#375

Post by returnInfinity »

zahlman wrote: post #373
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…

> $264B in 2024. Why is this much money spent on advertising? Surely it isn't really justified by increase in sales that could be attributed to the ads? You're telling me people actually buy these ridiculous products I see advertised?

It's a lot more complicated, but yes advertising works.

There is a saying in India, whats seen is what is sold.

Not the hidden best product.

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

#376

Post by FridgeSeal »

dwaltrip wrote: post #163
fred_is_fred wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deprecation only gets worse for them as they build-out, not better.

It gets worse until we hit the ceiling on what current tech is capable of. Then they can stop burning cash on enormous training runs and have a shot at becoming profitable.

They survive through inertia and “new model novelty”.

The minute they lose that (not just them, the whole sector), they’re toast.

I suspect they know this too, hence Sam-Altman admitting it’s a bubble so that he can try to ride it down without blowing up.

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

#377

Post by returnInfinity »

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…

ChatGpt has won. I talk to all teens living nearby and they all use chatgpt and not Google.

The teens, they don't know what is OpenAI, they don't know what is Gemini. They sure know what is ChatGPT.

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

#378

Post by majormajor »

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…

If they overnight were able to capture as much revenue per user as Meta (about 50 bucks a year) they'd bring in a bucket of cash immediately.

But selling that much ad inventory overnight - especially if they want new formats vs "here's a video randomly inserted in your conversation" sorta stuff - is far from easy.

Their compute costs could easily go down as technology advances. That helps.

But can they ramp up the advertising fast enough to bring in sufficient profit before cheaper down-market alternatives become common?

They lack the social-network lock-in effect of Meta, or the content of ESPN, and it remains to be seen if they will have the "but Google has better results than Bing" stickiness of Google.

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

#379

Post by byzantinegene »

gizmodo59 wrote: post #193
Havoc wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>distribution of the model is the real moat, theyre doing 700m WAU of the most financially valuable users on earth. Distribution isn't a moat if the thing being distributed is easily substitutable. Everything under the sun is OAI API compatible these days. 700 WAU are fickle AF when a competitor offers a comparable product for half the price. Moat needs to be something more durable. Cheaper, Better, some other value…

Not necessarily. I’m sure there is many cheaper android phones that are technically better in specs but many users won’t change. Once you are familiar, bought into the ecosystem getting rid of it is very hard. I’m lazy myself compared to how I was several years ago. The curious and experimental folks are a minority and the majority ll stick with what works initially instead of constantly analyzing what’s best all the…

you could argue that for apple devices, but openAI products have none of that ecosystem

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

#380

Post by vitus »

wslh wrote: post #337
Thaxll wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has google.com, youtube, chrome, android, gmail, google map etc ... I don't see OpenAI having a product close to that.

Google is older and many of the products you describe were acquisitions (inorganic growth).

> google.com, youtube, chrome, android, gmail, google map etc

Of those, it's 50/50. The acquisitions were YT, Android, Maps. Search was obviously Google's original product, Chrome was an in-house effort to rejuvenate the web after IE had caused years of stagnation, and Gmail famously started as a 20% project.

There are of course criticisms that Google has not really created any major (say, billion-user) in-house products in the past 15 years.

Post reply on HN