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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

#531

Post by tpetry »

t4TLLLSZ185x wrote: post #503

People in this comment section focus on brand ads too much. It’s the commercial intent where OpenAI can both make money and preserve trust. I already don’t Google anymore. I just ask ChatGPT „give me an overview of best meshtastic devices to buy“ and then eventually end with „give me links to where I can buy these in Europe“. OpenAI inserting ads in that last result, clearly marked as ads and still keeping the UX cle…

But its not clear whether the ad approach will work. It works for Google so great because the ads mimic real results very near so many people dont see them as an ad and click them.

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

#532

Post by lostlogin »

asa400 wrote: post #362
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…

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…

> Google has massive distribution with world-wide brands that people already know, trust, and pay for, especially in enterprise.

Do people trust Google in a positive sense? I trust them to try force me to login and to spam me with adverts.

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

#533

Post by lostlogin »

ineedasername wrote: post #478
MountDoom wrote: post #405

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…

>Google Docs instead of… All of these teens use Microsoft Word instead of Google Word, Microsoft NetMeeting instead of Google NetMeeting, Microsoft Hotmail instead of Google Mail, etc. I’m sure far fewer people go to MSN Search than to Google.com, but Microsoft has Windows integrated into all of these products, and it’s part of people’s workflows at school and at work.

When you say ‘Word’, do you mean the app, the web app, or the Teams app? They don’t work well together and leave documents looking truly awful on whichever variant you aren’t currently using.

That this bonfire is an industry standard has to be embarrassing for Microsoft.

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

#534

Post by lostlogin »

matwood wrote: post #499
taurath wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you want to be sold sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and see AI change the world?”

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

#535

Post by JumpCrisscross »

singularity2001 wrote: post #529
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

“Within Parsons' lifetime, the generating capacity of a [steam turbine] unit was scaled up by about 10,000 times” [1].

For comparison, Moore’s law (at 2 years per doubling) scales 4 orders of magnitude in about 27 years. That’s roughly the lifetime of a modern steam turbine [2]. In actuality, Parsons lived 77 years [3], implying a 13% growth rate, so doubling every 6 versus 2 years. But within the same order of magnitude.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_turbine

[2] https://alliedpg.com/latest-articles/life-extension-strategi... 30 years

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Algernon_Parsons

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

#536

Post by Esophagus4 »

lawn wrote: post #518
Esophagus4 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, this seems like a cop out. It’s so easy for people to shout bubble on the internet without actually putting their own money on the line. Talk is cheap - it doesn’t matter how many times you say it, I think you don’t have conviction if you’re not willing to put your own skin in the game. (Which is fine, you don’t have to put your money on the line. But it just annoys me when everyone cries “bubble” from the sideli…

You can correctly identify a bubble without being able to identify when it'll burst (which is arguably the much harder problem). The statistically correct play is therefore not to do this (and just keep buying).

Then no, you haven’t identified a bubble.

You’ve just said, “I think something will go down at some point.” Which… like… sure, but in a pointlessly trivial way? Even a broken clock is right eventually?

That’s not “identifying a bubble” that’s boring dinner small talk. “Wow, this Bitcoin thing is such a bubble huh!” “Yeah, sure is crazy!”

And even more so, if you’re long into something you call a bubble, that by definition says either you don’t think it’s that much of a bubble, huh? Or you’re a goon for betting on something you believe is all hot air?

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

#537

Post by dns_snek »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #471
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.

> ChatGPT has a phenomenal brand. If by "phenomenal" you mean "the premier slop and spam provider", then yes.

Sadly that's not how the wider public sees it.

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

#538

Post by mike_hearn »

matwood wrote: post #501
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).

The problem is that Google is horrible at product. They have been so spot on at search it's covered up all the other issues around products. YT is great, but they bought that. The Pixel should the Android phone, but they do a poor job marketing. They should be leading AI, but stumbled multiple times in the rollout. They normally get the tech right, and then fumble the productizing and marketing.

Pixel being undermarketed is deliberate, Android is an alliance and they don't want to compete against Samsung too hard.

But Google have other weaknesses. In the most valuable market (the USA) Google is very politically exposed. The left don't like them because they're big rich techbro capitalists, the Democrats tried to break them up. The right hate them because of their ongoing censorship, social engineering and cancellation of the right. They're rapidly running out of friends.

Just compare:

https://www.google.com/search?q=conservative+ai

https://www.bing.com/search?q=conservative+ai

The Google SERP is a trash fire, and it must be deliberate. It's almost like the search engine is broken. Not a single conservative chat bot ranks. On Bing the results are full of what the searcher is looking for. ChatGPT isn't perfect but it's a lot less biased than Google is. Its search results come from Bing which is more politically neutral. Also Altman is a fresh face who hasn't antagonized the right in the same way Google has. For ~half the population Gemini is still branded as "the bot that drew black nazis and popes", ChatGPT isn't. That's an own goal they didn't need.

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

#539

Post by dns_snek »

catlifeonmars wrote: post #433
alex43578 wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Lots of users would gladly pay way more than $30/year have an ad-free experience"? Outside of ads embedded in Google Maps, a free and simple install of Ublock Origin essentially eliminates ads in Search, YouTube, etc. I'd expect that just like Facebook, people would be very unwilling to pay for Google to eliminate ads, since right now they aren't even willing to add a browser extension.

Anecdata, but my nontechnical friends have never heard of uBlock origin. They all know about ad-free youtube.

uBlock Origin specifically or ad blockers in general?

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

#540

Post by amonith »

bashtoni wrote: post #505
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…

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

Same with "Pampers" in Poland. Everyone says "pampersy" when referring to just generic diapers. Almost nobody buys the literal "Pampers" brand.
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