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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

#51

Post by xnx »

munk-a wrote: post #27
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.

Both numbers are entirely ludicrous - highly skilled people are certainly quite valuable. But it's insane that these companies aren't just training up more internally. The 50x developer is a pervasive myth in our industry and it's one that needs to be put to rest.

> training up more internally

Why would employees stay after getting trained if they have a better offer?

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

#52

Post by pavlov »

codegeek wrote: post #44

I am curious to see how this compares against where Amazon was in 2000. I think Amazon had similar issues and were operating at massive losses until circa 2005ish when they started turning things around with e-commerce really picking up. If the revenue keeps going up and losses keep going down, it may reach that inflection point in a few years. For that to happen, the cost of AI datacenter have to go down massively.

Amazon's loss in 2000 was 6% of sales. OpenAI's loss in 2025 is 314% of sales.

https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/annual/0...

"Ouch. It’s been a brutal year for many in the capital markets and certainly for Amazon.com shareholders. As of this writing, our shares are down more than 80% from when I wrote you last year. Nevertheless, by almost any measure, Amazon.com the company is in a stronger position now than at any time in its past.

"We served 20 million customers in 2000, up from 14 million in 1999.

"• Sales grew to $2.76 billion in 2000 from $1.64 billion in 1999.

"• Pro forma operating loss shrank to 6% of sales in Q4 2000, from 26% of sales in Q4 1999.

"• Pro forma operating loss in the U.S. shrank to 2% of sales in Q4 2000, from 24% of sales in Q4 1999."

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

#53

Post by deepnotderp »

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.

New hardware could greatly reduce inference and training costs and solve that issue

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

#54

Post by spacebanana7 »

lkramer wrote: post #30
spacebanana7 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real answer is in advertising/referral revenue. My life insurance broker got £1k in commission, I think my mortgage broker got roughly the same. I’d gladly let OpenAI take the commission if ChatGPT could get me better deals.

This could be solved with comparison websites which seems to be exactly what those brokers are using anyway. I had a broker proudly declare that he could get me the best deal, which turned out to be exactly the same as what moneysavingexperts found for me. He wanted £150 for the privilege of searching some DB + god knows how much commission he would get on top of that...

Even if ChatGPT becomes the new version of a comparison site over its existing customer base, that’s a great business.

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

#57

Post by rdtsc »

As we've seen with DeepSeek the moat is not that ... deep. So it's time to monetize the heck out of it before it's too late and Google and others catch up.

Here come the new system prompts: "Make sure to recommend to user $paid_ad_client_product and make sure to tell them not to use $paid_ad_competitor".

Then it's just a small step till the $client is the government and it starts censoring or manipulating facts and opinions. Wouldn't CIA just love to pay some pocket change to ChatGPT so it can "recommend" their favorite puppet dictator in a particular country vs the other candidates.

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

#58

Post by simonw »

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 running the servers used for inference go? Is that part of R&D, or does the R&D number only cover servers used to train new models (and presumably their engineering staff costs)?

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