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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

#551

Post by suddenlybananas »

rahulyc wrote: post #516
crystal_revenge wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ads in the future. It boggles my mind that people still think advertising can be a major part of the economy. If AI is propping up the economy right now [0] how is it possible that the rest of the economy can possibly fund AI through profit sharing? That's fundamentally what advertising is: I give you a share of my revenue (hopefully from profits) in order to help increase my market share. The limit of what adverti…

I think your argument isn't exactly right. You can imagine a future world where producing real goods and services is ~free (AI compute infinite etc.) In this world, the entire economy will be ~advertising only so you can charge people anything at all instead of giving it away for free.

If your revenue model is predicated on Star Trek-style communism, it's maybe not a very realistic model. I really don't think if producing things is essentially free that advertising will be a very big thing since it would be pointless.

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

#552

Post by card_zero »

cwsx wrote: post #512
bashtoni wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

BAND-AID is another one

And "generic trademark" is the Wikipedia article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark

Huh, bubble wrap, even.

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

#553

Post by philipallstar »

cwsx wrote: post #512
bashtoni wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

BAND-AID is another one

Tannoy another.

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

#554

Post by kldg »

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…

Yeah, for me, the biggest issue is, counter-intuitively given it's Google, I know Gemini is going to continue existing as a product for a long time; I feel comfortable storing data and building things out for it. Anthropic's putting out great models, but it's financially endangered, and OpenAI isn't doing great either; and I'm confident Gemini 3 release will put it right back at top-of-pack again as far as model output quality, so these little windows where I'm not using The Best are not a big deal.

Once the single-focus companies have to actually make a profit and flip the switch from poorly monetized to fully monetized, I think folks will be immediately jumping ship to mega-companies like Google who can indefinitely sustain the freemium model. The single-focus services are going to be Hell to use once the free rides end: price hikes, stingy limits, and ads everywhere.

.... but the field will change unpredictably. Amazon offers a lot of random junk with Prime -- hike price $50/year, slap on a subscription to high-grade AI chatbot 10% of users will actually use (say 2% are "heavy users"), and now Anthropic is financially sustainable. Maybe NYT goes from $400 to $500 per year, and now you get ChatGPT Pro, so everything's fine at OpenAI. There're a ton of financial ideas you'll come up with once you feel the fire at your feet; maybe the US government will take a stake and start shilling services when you file taxes. Do you want the $250 Patriot Package charged against your tax refund, or are we throwing this in the evidence pile containing your Casio F91-W purchase and tribal tattoos?

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

#555

Post by netdevphoenix »

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…

What is Google's competitive moat? There's no product stickiness here. What prevents people from just using Altavista/Yahoo/[any other search engine].

You vastly underestimate the power of habit and branding combined together. Just like then, the vast majority of people equate ChatGPT with AI chatbot, there is no concept of alternative AI chatbot. Sure people might have seen some AI looking thing called Copilot and some weird widget in the Google Search results but so far ChatGPT is winning the marketing game even if the offerings from rivals might be the same or even superior sometimes

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

#556

Post by mike_hearn »

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…

Well, web search is also function(query: String): String in a sense, and that has one heck of a moat.

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

#558

Post by littlestymaar »

christina97 wrote: post #161
wood_spirit wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike railroads and fibre, all the best compute in 2025 will be lacklustre in 2027. It won’t retain much value in the same way as the infrastructure of previous bubbles did?

The A100 came out 5.5 years ago and is still the staple for many AI/ML workloads. Even AI hardware just doesn’t depreciate that quickly.

Unless you care about FLOP/Watt, which big players definitely do.

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

#559

Post by iLoveOncall »

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

This is just HackerNews bias.

Everyone that has used ChatGPT (or any other LLM really) has already been burnt by being provided a completely false answer. On the contrary everyone understands that Google never claimed to provide a true answer, just links to potential answers.

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

#560

Post by jrflowers »

1oooqooq wrote: post #360
jrflowers wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

can see cramer "buy pets.com! general revenue is just around the corner"

Pets.com could have traded at a significant multiple of the entire combined revenue of the pet space if investors simply poured infinite dollars into it.

The could have even got into the programming space with all that capital. Pawed Code

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