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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

#401

Post by beacon294 »

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…

AI has been incredibly sticky. Look at the outrage, OpenAI couldn't even deprecate 4o or whatever because it's incredibly popular. Those people aren't leaving OAI if they're not even leaving a last gen model.

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

#402

Post by ipaddr »

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.

He means chatGPT means AI to most people.

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

#403

Post by Mistletoe »

VirgilShelton wrote: post #340

I'm old and have been on the Internet since the Prodigy days in 90. Open Ai has the best start of any company I can remember. Even better than Google back in 98 when they were developing their algo and giving free non-monetized search results to Yahoo. These guys have had my $20 bucks a month since Plus was live, they will indeed be more than fine.

Do you really find it is worth it vs. the free Google Gemini? What do you use it for? I can't imagine needing more than Google Gemini 2.5 Flash or Pro, but I don't use it for programming or anything.

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

#404

Post by voidfunc »

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…

Brand. Brand. Brand!

Literally nobody but nerds know what a Claude is among many others.

ChatGPT has name recognition and that matters massively.

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

#405

Post by MountDoom »

returnInfinity wrote: post #377
asa400 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All of these teens use Google Docs instead of OpenAI Docs, Google Meet instead of OpenAI Meet, Gmail instead of OpenAI Mail, etc.

I'm sure that far fewer people to go gemini.google.com than to chatgpt.com, but Google has LLMs seamlessly integrated in each of these products, and it's a part of people's workflows at school and at work.

For a while, I was convinced that OpenAI had won and that Google won't be able to recover, but this lack of vertical integration is becoming a liability. It's probably why OpenAI is trying to branch into weird stuff, like running a walled-garden TikTok clone.

Also keep in mind that unlike OpenAI, Google isn't under pressure to monetize AI products any time soon. They can keep subsidizing them until OpenAI runs out of other people's money. I'm not saying OpenAI has no path forward, but it's not all that clear-cut.

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

#406

Post by wslh »

returnInfinity wrote: post #391
Workaccount2 wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By this point I imagine it's a novelty to find any code from the original acquisition in those products.

Code is secondary. Pmf is primary. Code is a commodity. Very easy to make. Now even llms are commodities. There are other intangible assets more valuable. Like the chatgpt brand here.

This is beyond PMF, it's about traction on steroids, owning the last mile.

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

#407

Post by oblio »

christina97 wrote: post #161
wood_spirit wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike railroads and fibre, all the best compute in 2025 will be lacklustre in 2027. It won’t retain much value in the same way as the infrastructure of previous bubbles did?

The A100 came out 5.5 years ago and is still the staple for many AI/ML workloads. Even AI hardware just doesn’t depreciate that quickly.

Don't they degrade physically from being run at full blast 24/7 for so many years?

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

#408

Post by sharkweek »

rajaman0 wrote: post #371
asa400 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve got “normie” friends who I’d bet don’t even know that what Google has at the top of their search results is “AI” results and instead assume it’s just some extension of the normal search results we’ve all gotten used to (knowledge graph)

Every one of them refers to using “ChatGPT” when talking about AI.

How likely is it to stay that way? No idea, but OpenAI has clearly captured a notable amount of mindshare in this new era.

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

#409

Post by crystal_revenge »

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…

> ads in the future.

It boggles my mind that people still think advertising can be a major part of the economy.

If AI is propping up the economy right now [0] how is it possible that the rest of the economy can possibly fund AI through profit sharing? That's fundamentally what advertising is: I give you a share of my revenue (hopefully from profits) in order to help increase my market share. The limit of what advertising spend can be is percent of profits minus some epsilon (for a functioning economy at least).

Advertising cannot be the lions share of any economy because it derives it's value from the rest of the economy.

Advertising is also a major bubble because my one assumption there (that it's a share of profits) is generally not the case. Unprofitable companies giving away a share of their revenue to other companies making those companies profitable is not sustainable.

Advertising could save AI if AI was a relatively small part of the US (or world) economy and could benefit by extracting a share of the profits from other companies. But if most your GDP is from AI how can it possibly cannibalize other companies in a sustainable way?

0. https://www.techspot.com/news/109626-ai-bubble-only-thing-ke...

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

#410

Post by ipaddr »

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?

A lot of that money comes from search result ads. Sometimes I click on an ad to visit a site I search for instead of scrolling to the same link in the actual search results. Many companies bid on keywords for their own name to prevent others from taking a customer who is interested in you.

You use to be a useful site and be at the top of the search results for some keywords and now you have to pay.

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