OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss • Hacker News Board

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

#451

Post by HDThoreaun » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 4:04 AM UTC

nojs wrote: post #293

zdragnar wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is OpenAI's moat? There's plenty of competitors running their own models and tools. Sure, they have the ChatGPT name, but I don't see them massively out-competing the entire market unless the future model changes drastically improve over the 3->4->5 trajectory.

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's moat is a combination of it being free and either being equal to or outright better than competitors

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

#452

Post by ppseafield » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 4:06 AM UTC

vitus wrote: post #380

wslh wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prod…

Chrome's engine was WebKit originally, which they then forked. Not an acquisition, but benefitted greatly from prior work.

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

#453

Post by gigatexal » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 4:07 AM UTC

fooker wrote: post #446

01100011 wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm saying Google is going to win. They're not beholden to their current architecture as much as other shovelmakers and can pivot their TPU to offer the best inference perf/$. They also hold about as much personal data as anyone else and have plenty of stuff to train on in-house. I work for a competitor and even I think there's a good chance google "wins"(there's never a winner because the race never ends).

Is there publicly available evidence that TPU perf/$ is better than Blackwell ? I know it seems intuitively true but was surprised to not really find evidence for it.

yeah ... poly market and other makers seem to be betting that Google by year's end or sometime next year or so will have teh best gen ai models on the market ... but I've been using Claude sonnet 4.5 with GitHub Copilot and swear by it.

anyways would be nice to really see some apples-to-apples benchmarks of the TPU vs Nvidia hardware but how would that work given CUDA is not hardware agnostic?

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

#454

Post by singron » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 4:08 AM UTC

adventured wrote: post #25

JCM9 wrote: post #8

These numbers are pretty ugly. You always expect new tech to operate at a loss initially but the structure of their losses is not something one easily scales out of. In fact it gets more painful as they scale. Unless something fundamentally changes and fast this is gonna get ugly real quick.

There is an exceptionally obvious solution for OpenAI & ChatGPT: ads. In fact it's an unavoidable solution. There is no future for OpenAI that doesn't involve a gigantic, highly lucrative ad network attached to ChatGPT. One of the dumbest things in tech at present is OpenAI not having already deployed this. It's an attitude they can't actually afford to maintain much longer. Ads are a hyper margin product that are ve…

Will people use ChatGPT if it's stuffed full of ads? It seems like the belief that ads are turn-key is useful to their valuation, but if ads actually bomb, then they will take a huge hit.

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

#455

Post by taurath » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 4:09 AM UTC

raincole wrote: post #449

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…

Brand is the second most important moat (only shy to regulation capture). If normal people start saying "ChatGPT" to refer to AI they win, just like how google became a verb for search. It seems to be the case.

As a counter, you can buy a hell of a lot of brand for $8 billion dollars though.

You can give your most active 50,000 users $160,000 each, for example.

You can run campaign ads in every billboard, radio, tv station and every facebook feed tarring and feathering ChatGPT

Hell, for only $200m you could just get the current admin to force ChatGPT to sell to Larry Ellison, and deport Sam Altman to Abu Dahbi like Nermal from Garfield.

So many options!

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

#456

Post by jandy » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 4:18 AM UTC

chii wrote: post #435

sharkweek wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

when people started referring to searching the internet as googling, they know their brand has made it. It is the same with chatGPT.

Yep, this. I’ve switched to Claude for a while (because I can’t afford max plans for both) and nobody in the real world has any idea what it is I’m talking about. “Oh it’s like ChatGPT?”

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

#457

Post by raincole » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 4:18 AM UTC

taurath wrote: post #455

raincole wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brand is the second most important moat (only shy to regulation capture). If normal people start saying "ChatGPT" to refer to AI they win, just like how google became a verb for search. It seems to be the case.

As a counter, you can buy a hell of a lot of brand for $8 billion dollars though. You can give your most active 50,000 users $160,000 each, for example. You can run campaign ads in every billboard, radio, tv station and every facebook feed tarring and feathering ChatGPT Hell, for only $200m you could just get the current admin to force ChatGPT to sell to Larry Ellison, and deport Sam Altman to Abu Dahbi like Nermal f…

Yes, and it's what they're doing. Buying brand.

> OpenAI also spent US$2 billion on sales and ad

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

#458

Post by necovek » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 4:18 AM UTC

lemonlearnings wrote: post #416

simonw wrote: post #58

I think the most interesting numbers in this piece (ignoring the stock compensation part) are: $4.3 billion in revenue - presumably from ChatGPT customers and API fees $6.7 billion spent on R&D $2 billion on sales and marketing - anyone got any idea what this is? I don't remember seeing many ads for ChatGPT but clearly I've not been paying attention in the right places. Open question for me: where does the cost of ru…

I have seen a tonnes of Chat GPT ads on Reddit. Usually with image generation of a dog in Japanese cartoon style.

The dog sitting in a house on fire proclaiming "this is fine" is an old meme, not an OpenAI generated image.

Oh, not that dog? :)

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

#459

Post by StarterPro » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 4:19 AM UTC

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…

Its a completely optional purchase, and there's no clear way for ads to be included without it muddying up the actual answer.

"The most popular brand of bread in America is........BUTTERNUT (AD)"

Its a sinkhole that they are destroying our environment for. Its not sustainable on a massive scale, and I expect to see Sam Altman join his 30 under 30 cohorts SBF and such eventually.

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

#460

Post by necovek » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 4:22 AM UTC

chermi wrote: post #183

gmerc wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop R&D and the competition is at parity with 10x cheaper models in 3-6 months. Stop training and your code model generates tech debt after 3-6 month

It's pretty well accepted now that for pre-training LLMs the curve is S not an exponential, right? Maybe it's all in RL post-training now, but my understanding(?) is that it's not nearly as expensive as pre-training. I don't think 3-6 months is the time to 10X improvement anymore (however that's measured), it seems closer to a year and growing assuming the plateau is real. I'd love to know if there are solid estimate…

Someone brought up an interesting point: to get the latest data (news, scientific breakthroughs...) into the model, you need to constantly retrain it.