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

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421–430 of 777 posts

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

#421
post #396
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,…

Something nobody's talking about: OpenAI's losses might actually be attractive to certain investors from a tax perspective. Microsoft and other corporate investors can potentially use their share of OpenAI's operating losses to offset their own taxable income through partnership tax treatment. It's basically a tax-advantaged way to fund R&D - you get the loss deductions now while retaining upside optionality later. T…

> For the right investor base, $10B in annual losses at OpenAI could be worth $2-3B in tax shields (depending on their bracket and how the structure works). That completely changes the return calculation

I know nothing about finances at this level, so asking like a complete newbie: doesn't that just mean that instead of risking $10B they're risking $7-8B? It is a cheaper bet for sure, but doesn't look to me like a game changer when the range of the bet's outcome goes from 0 to 1000% or more.

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

#422
post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that actually a moat? Seems like all model providers managed to scrape the entire textual internet just fine. If video is the next big thing I don’t see why they won’t scrape that too.

Scraping text across the entire internet is orders of magnitudes easier than scraping YouTube. Even ignoring the sheer volume of data (exabytes), you simply will get blocked at an IP and account level before you make a reasonable dent. Even if you controlled the entire IPv4 space I’m not sure you could scrape all of YouTube without getting every single address banned. IPv6 makes address bans harder, true, but then yo…

For now, you actually get pretty far with Tor. Just reset your connection when you hit an IP ban by sending SIGHUP to the Tor daemon.

I did that when I was retraining Stable Audio for fun and it really turned out to be trivial enough to pull of as a little evening side project.

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

#423
post #405
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 still don't understand how it's world-changing apart from considerably degrading the internet. It's laughable to compare it to railroads.

Did you try asking chatgpt to explain?

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

#424
post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something nobody's talking about: OpenAI's losses might actually be attractive to certain investors from a tax perspective. Microsoft and other corporate investors can potentially use their share of OpenAI's operating losses to offset their own taxable income through partnership tax treatment. It's basically a tax-advantaged way to fund R&D - you get the loss deductions now while retaining upside optionality later. T…

>> For the right investor base, $10B in annual losses at OpenAI could be worth $2-3B in tax shields So just a loss for governments, or in other words, socializing the losses.

Hi, I'm here to hold the bag?

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

#425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It did. I question the issue of "what problem am I trying to solve" with AI, though. Transportation across a huge swath of land had a clear problem space, and trains offered a very clear solution; created dedicated railing and you can transport 100x the resources at 10x the speed of a horseman (and I'm probably underselling these gains). In times where trekking across a continent took months, the efficiencies in comm…

> AI feels like a solution looking for a problem. The problem is increasing profits by replacing paid labor with something "good enough".

Isn’t this what industrialisation was always about?

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

#426
post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> For the right investor base, $10B in annual losses at OpenAI could be worth $2-3B in tax shields So just a loss for governments, or in other words, socializing the losses.

Hi, I'm here to hold the bag?

We really should have thought of this before becoming peasants.

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

#427
post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> For the right investor base, $10B in annual losses at OpenAI could be worth $2-3B in tax shields So just a loss for governments, or in other words, socializing the losses.

Hi, I'm here to hold the bag?

Your pension fund, yes.

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

#428
A second, less likely bubble?: IP rights enforcement. While the existing content hosters might have a neatly sewn up content agreement with their users such that all their group chats and cat photos can be used for training, I am a lot less confident that OAI came by its training data legitimately.

(Adjacent to this is how crazy it was that Meta were accused of torrenting ebooks. Did they need them for the underlying knowledge? I can’t imagine they needed them for natural langauge examples.)

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

#429
post #329

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.

On paper, Google should never have allowed the ChatGPT moment to happen ; how did a then non-profit create what was basically a better search engine than Google? Google suffers from classic Innovator's Dilemma and need competition to refocus on what ought to be basic survival instincts. What is worse is the search users are not the customers. The customers of Google Search are the advertisers and they will always pri…

Google allowed this to happen because they listened to their compliance department and were afraid of a backslash if LLM says something that could anger people.

Sergey Brin interview: https://x.com/slow_developer/status/1999876970562166968?s=20

This attitude also partially explains the black vikings incident.

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

#430
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,…

Or the airlines. Airlines have created a huge amount of economic value that has mostly been captured by other entities.
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