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

Post by shaky-carrousel » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 8:56 AM UTC

aurareturn wrote: post #439

cmiles8 wrote: post #276

AI is turning into the worst possible business setup for AI startups. A commodity that requires huge capital investment and ongoing innovation to stay relevant. There’s no room for someone to run a small but profitable gold mine or couple of oil wells on the side. The only path to survival is investing crazy sums just to stay relevant and keep up. Meanwhile customers have virtually zero brand loyalty so if you slip b…

There is clearly a very strong moat. OpenAI is close to 1 billion active users on ChatGPT while Claude barely have any non-business users. Even though Anthropic had better models at different times this year, I never stopped using ChatGPT and paying for Plus. We just don't know who will win in which area yet. It doesn't mean there is no moat.

Post by charcircuit » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 8:59 AM UTC

dilyevsky wrote: post #398

xivzgrev wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention security. I'd trust Google more not to have a data breach than open AI / whomever. Email accounts are hugely valuable but I haven't seen a Google data breach in the 20+ years I've been using them. This matters because I don't want my chats out there in public. Also integration with other services. I just had Gemini summarize the contents of a Google Drive folder and it was effortless & effective

Not that I disagree with your assessment but in the spirit of hn pedantry - google had a very significant breach where gmail was a primary target and that was “only” 16 years ago in mid 2009. So bad that it has its own wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora

Post by lotsofpulp » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 9:03 AM UTC

pvtmert wrote: post #441

jotras wrote: 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…

Amazon already has not been paying any sort of income tax to the EU. There was a lawsuit in Belgium but Amazon has won that in late-2024 since they had a separate agreement in/with Luxembourg. Speaking for EU, all big tech already not paying taxes one way or another, either using Dublin/Ireland (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, ...) and Luxembourg (Amazon & Microsoft as far as I can tell) to avoid such corporate/inco…

Post by oblio » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 9:04 AM UTC

pier25 wrote: post #382

avalys wrote: 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,…

Did railroads change the world though? They only lasted a couple of decades as the main transportation method. I'd say the internal combustion engine was a lot more transformative.

Post by aurareturn » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 9:07 AM UTC

shaky-carrousel wrote: post #462

aurareturn wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is clearly a very strong moat. OpenAI is close to 1 billion active users on ChatGPT while Claude barely have any non-business users. Even though Anthropic had better models at different times this year, I never stopped using ChatGPT and paying for Plus. We just don't know who will win in which area yet. It doesn't mean there is no moat.

OpenAI has close to 1 billion users which are mostly free users and will switch provider the moment OpenAI start charging them or adding ads. Which they will, as OpenAI themselves said they are losing money even with 200$ subs. So that amount of users is pretty meaningless.