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

#491

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 5:57 AM UTC

xz0r wrote: post #385

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…

Let me direct you to the reddit AMA where people were literally begging to bring back 4o.

Yeah, anyone saying "Normal, non-technical users can't tell the difference between these models at all" isn't talking to that many normal, non-technical users.

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

#492

Post by toephu2 » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 6:05 AM UTC

darth_avocado wrote: post #20

hmate9 wrote: post #5

$2.5B in stock comp for about 3,000 employees. that’s roughly $830k per person in just six months. Almost 60% of their revenue went straight back to staff.

They have to compete with Zuckerberg throwing $100M comps to poach people. I think $830k per person is nothing in comparison.

Zuck isn't throwing 100M comps at many people (maybe 1 or 2 at most?), that's a myth that was debunked.

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

#493

Post by Sateeshm » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 6:08 AM UTC

Analemma_ wrote: post #78

JCM9 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fundamentally different business models. Amazon had huge capital investments that got less painful as it scaled. Amazon also focuses on cash flow vs profit. Even early on it generated a lot of cash, it just reinvested that back into the business which meant it made a “loss” on paper. OpenAI is very different. Their “capital” expense depreciation (model development) has a really ugly depreciation curve. It’s not like…

Not to mention nobody bothered chasing Amazon-- by the time potential competitors like Walmart realized what was up, it was way too late and Amazon had a 15-year head start. OpenAI had a head start with models for a bit, but now their models are basically as good (maybe a little better, maybe a little worse) than the ones from Anthropic and Google, so they can't stay still for a second. Not to mention switching costs…

It's not just the head start, it's the network effect.

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

#494

Post by Sateeshm » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 6:11 AM UTC

senordevnyc wrote: post #345

Havoc wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>my uncle Bill and my mother can and do use ChatGPT. They have the name brand for sure. And that is worth a lot. Notice how Deepseek went from a nobody to making mainstream news though. The only thing people like more than a trusted thing is being able to tell their friends about this amazing cheap good alternative they "discovered". It's good to be #1 mind share wise but without network effect that still leave you v…

I know almost no one outside of tech who has used anything other than ChatGPT. And I know few people under 65 who aren’t using ChatGPT.

This was my observation too for a while. But I'm seeing a lot of non-tech people using Gemini

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

#495

Post by buu700 » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 6:12 AM UTC

Workaccount2 wrote: post #354

chermi wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we actually know how they're degrading? Are there still Pascals out there? If not, is it because they actual broke or because of poor performance? I understand it's tempting to say near 100% workload for multiple years = fast degradation, but what are the actual stats? Are you talking specifically about the actual compute chip or the whole compute system -- I know there's a big difference now with the systems Nvid…

Believe it or not, the GPUs from bitcoin farms are often the most reliable. Since they were run 24/7, there was rarely the kind of heat stress that kills cards (heating and cooling cycles).

Could AI providers follow the same strategy? Just throw any spare inference capacity at something to make sure the GPUs are running 24/7, whether that's model training, crypto mining, protein folding, a "spot market" for non-time-sensitive/async inference workloads, or something else entirely.

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

#496

Post by gopheryourshelf » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 6:12 AM UTC

jandy wrote: post #456

chii wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?”

Claude is also difficult to consistently pronounce for a non-English speaker. Sometimes people dont say that because it can get misinterpreted. ChatGPT is something easy on the the tongue and very difficult to mis-pronounce.

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

#497

Post by boston_clone » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 6:15 AM UTC

parineum wrote: post #423

rajaman0 wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> They have 700 million weekly users and growing much faster than Google. Years old company growing faster than decades old company! 2.5 billion people use Gmail. I assume people check their mail (and, more importantly, receive mail) much more often than weekly. ChatGPT has a lot of growing to do to catch up, even if it's faster

I read that as OpenAI’s WAU is showing a steeper increase than Google ever did. Not saying it’s factually accurate, just that it’s not a fixed point-in-time comparison :)

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

#498

Post by jzl » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 6:21 AM UTC

toephu2 wrote: post #492

darth_avocado wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have to compete with Zuckerberg throwing $100M comps to poach people. I think $830k per person is nothing in comparison.

Zuck isn't throwing 100M comps at many people (maybe 1 or 2 at most?), that's a myth that was debunked.

It’s debatable that it was debunked. There was squirrelly wording about some specific claims. One person was reported to have been offered a package worth a billion dollars, which even if exaggerated was probably not exaggerated by 10x. The numbers line up when you consider that AI startup founders and early employees stand to potentially make well into 9 figures if not higher, and Meta is trying to cut them off at the pass. Obviously these kinds of offers, whatever they really look like, include significant conditions and performance requirements.

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

#499

Post by matwood » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 6:21 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…

According to Google, Coca Cola spent over $5B on advertising in 2024 and most of the world already knows who they are. I think $8B (or the $2B OpenAI spent) buys a lot less branding than you think.

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

#500

Post by mrweasel » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 6:25 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…

> ChatGPT has more consumer trust than Google at this point

That trust is gone the moment they start selling ad space. Where would they put the ads? In the answers? That would force more people to buy a subscription, just to avoid having the email to your boss contain a sponsored message. The numbers for Q2 looks promising, sells are going up. And speaking of sales, Jif peanut butter is on sale this week.

If OpenAI plan on making money with ads then all the investments made by Nvidia, Microsoft and Softbank starts to look incredibly stupid. Smartest AI in the world, but we can only make money by showing you gambling ads.