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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

#521
post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah yes, the Latin-originating French name that has a variant at least in every Latin language is hard to pronounce for non-English users.

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

#522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is much closer to the dotcom boom than the subprime stuff. The dotcom boom/bust affected tech more than anything else. It didn’t involve consumers like the housing crash did.

[flagged]

Do you mean pre-profit/without ever making a profit? I found an article about their IPO:

> Pets.com lost $42.4 million during the fourth quarter last year on $5.2 million in sales. Since the company's inception in February of last year, it has lost $61.8 million on $5.8 million in sales.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/pets-com-raises-82-5...

They had sales, they were just making a massive loss. Isn’t that pretty similar to AI companies, just on a way smaller scale?

We haven’t seen AI IPOs yet, but it’s not hard to imagine one of them going public before making profit IMO.

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

#523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of these teens use Google Docs instead of OpenAI Docs, Google Meet instead of OpenAI Meet, Gmail instead of OpenAI Mail, etc. I'm sure that far fewer people to go gemini.google.com than to chatgpt.com, but Google has LLMs seamlessly integrated in each of these products, and it's a part of people's workflows at school and at work. For a while, I was convinced that OpenAI had won and that Google won't be able to re…

>All of these teens use Google Docs instead of OpenAI Docs, Google Meet instead of OpenAI Meet, Gmail instead of OpenAI Mail, etc. Billions of people use Meta apps and products. Meta AI is all over all those apps. Why is usage minuscule compared to ChatGPT or even Gemini ? Google has billions of users, many using devices operating their own OS, in which Gemini is now the default AI assistant, so why does ChatGPT usag…

I keep hearing that from Meta Propaganda. All those fascinating AI stats.

I've never once seen Meta AI.

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

#524
Just look at what’s going with JetBrains AI quotas and costs, once AI is deeply imbedded and businesses move the cost to customers like JetBrains have these AI companies are going to make a killing.

It’s the drug dealer model, get them hooked on free tastes and then crank up the prices!

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

#525

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…

In the UK, everyone refers to a vacuum as a 'hoover'. They are not the dominant vacuum brand there despite the massive name recognition.

their own fault :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_free_flights_promotion

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

#526
post #362
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…

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…

> What is OpenAI's competitive moat? There's no product stickiness here.

Doesn't look worse than Google Search's moat to me? And that worked really well for a long time.

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

#527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The CEO is also more puritan than the pope himself considering the amount of censorship it has. Not sure if they are even interested in marketing to normies though.

> The CEO is also more puritan than the pope himself considering the amount of censorship it has.

In that case, you should try OpenAI's gpt-oss!

Both models are pretty fast for their size and I wanted to use them to summarize stories and try out translation. But it keeps checking everything against "policy" all the time! I created a jailbreak that works around this, but it still wastes a few hundred tokens talking about policy before it produces useful output.

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

#528
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 p…

I'm afraid there's plenty of avenues for them to insert ads that probably won't be perceived as obnoxious by most people (I still find it incredibly obnoxious).

About half of AI queries are "Asking" (as opposed to Doing or Expressing) and those are the ones best suited for ads. User asking how to make pizza? Show ads for baking steels and premium passata. User asking for a three day sightseeing routine in Rome? I'm sure someone will pay you them to show their venue.

It seems unlikely that the ads will be embedded directly into the answer stream, unless they find a way to reliably label such portions as advertisements in a "clear and conspicuous" way, or convince law makers/regulators that chat bots don't need to be held to the same standards as other media.

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

#529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately changing 2027 to 2030 doesn't make the math much better

> changing 2027 to 2030 doesn't make the math much better Could you show me? Early turbines didn't last that long. Even modern ones are only rated for a few decades.

there is a difference between a few decades and half a decade though? Or his time in general accelerated so much that it's basically very similar

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

#530
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…

> $264B in 2024. Why is this much money spent on advertising? Surely it isn't really justified by increase in sales that could be attributed to the ads? You're telling me people actually buy these ridiculous products I see advertised?

I work/have worked ecom adjacent for a long time. Ads absolutely work and the continued bewilderment of HN users to this reality will never cease to amaze me.
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