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

#561

Post by dickersnoodle » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 10:14 AM UTC

alok-g wrote: post #283

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…

>> ... underestimating the money they will come from ads in the future. I would like AI to focus on helping consumers discover the right products for their stated needs as opposed to just being shown (personalized) ads. As of now, I frequently have a hard time finding the things I need via Amazon search, Google, as well as ChatGPT.

Good luck with that. Every supermarket I've been in has those stupid baskets or racks of stuff blocking the aisle and their data must show that it gets people to buy a little more of that stuff even though it makes me quite resolved to never buy the shit they're forcing me to look at in order to go get the five things I really need.

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

#562

Post by belter » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 10:26 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…

So they are losing money but will make it on volume? :-)

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

#563

Post by CodingJeebus » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 10:29 AM UTC

vitaflo wrote: post #219

conartist6 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that the investments just won't pay off, it's that the global markets are likely to crash like happened with the subprime mortgage crisis.

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.

We are starting to see larger economic exposure to AI.

Banks are handing out huge loans to the neocloud companies that are being collateralized with GPUs. These loans could easily go south if the bottom falls out of the GPU market. Hopefully it’s a very small amount of liquidity tied up in those loans.

Tech stocks make up a significant part of the stock market now. Where the tech stocks go, the market will follow. Everyday consumers invested in index funds will definitely see a hit to their portfolios if AI busts.

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

#564

Post by fennecbutt » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 10:30 AM UTC

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #314

cj wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> money on fire forever just to jog in place. Why? I don't see why these companies can't just stop training at some point. Unless you're saying the cost of inference is unsustainable? I can envision a future where ChatGPT stops getting new SOTA models, and all future models are built for enterprise or people willing to pay a lot of money for high ROI use cases. We don't need better models for the vast majority of cha…

>I don't see why these companies can't just stop training at some point. Because training isn't just about making brand new models with better capabilities, it's also about updating old models to stay current with new information. Even the most sophisticated present-day model with a knowledge cutoff date of 2025 would be severely crippled by 2027 and utterly useless by 2030. Unless there is some breakthrough that let…

Ain't never hearda rag

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

#565

Post by wood_spirit » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 10:33 AM UTC

potatolicious wrote: post #136

mattmanser wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is it a bit like a game of musical chairs? At some point the AI becomes good enough, and if you're not sitting in a chair at the time, you're not going to be the next Google.

Not necessarily? That assumes that the first "good enough" model is a defensible moat - i.e., the first ones to get there becomes the sole purveyors of the Good AI. In practice that hasn't borne out. You can download and run open weight models now that are spitting distance to state-of-the-art, and open weight models are at best a few months behind the proprietary stuff. And even within the realm of proprietary model…

Perhaps the first thing the owners ask the first true AGI is “how do I dominate the world?” and the AGI outlines how to stop any competitor getting AGI..?

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

#566

Post by fennecbutt » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 10:33 AM UTC

necovek wrote: post #460

chermi wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty well accepted now that for pre-training LLMs the curve is S not an exponential, right? Maybe it's all in RL post-training now, but my understanding(?) is that it's not nearly as expensive as pre-training. I don't think 3-6 months is the time to 10X improvement anymore (however that's measured), it seems closer to a year and growing assuming the plateau is real. I'd love to know if there are solid estimate…

Someone brought up an interesting point: to get the latest data (news, scientific breakthroughs...) into the model, you need to constantly retrain it.

Or, you know, use rag. Which is far better and more accurate than regurgitating compressed training knowledge.

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

#567

Post by fennecbutt » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 10:34 AM UTC

lemonlearnings wrote: post #416

simonw wrote: post #58

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 ru…

I have seen a tonnes of Chat GPT ads on Reddit. Usually with image generation of a dog in Japanese cartoon style.

This seems to be a common ad template for reddit ads, it's not just oai I've seen loads of ads use the this is fine template.

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

#568

Post by bcrl » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 10:36 AM UTC

aurareturn wrote: post #303

bcrl wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! The cost of training models inevitably goes down over time as FLOPS/$ and PB/$ increases relentlessly thanks to the exponential gains of Moore's law. Eventually we will end up with laptops and phones being Good Enough to run models locally. Once that happens, any competitor in the space that decides to actively support running locally will have operating costs that are a mere fraction of OpenAI's current busine…

You just said that everyone will be able to run a powerful AI locally and then you said this would lead to a pop of the bubble. Well, which is it? That AI is going to have huge demands for chips that it is going to get much bigger or is the bubble going to pop? You can’t have both. My opinion is that local LLMs will do a bulk of the low value interference such as your personal life mundane tasks. But cloud AI will be…

Just because a bubble pops on the economic front doesn't mean the sector goes away. Pets.com went bust a mere 10 months after going public, yet we're buying all kinds of products online in 2025 that we weren't in 2000. A bubble popping is about the disconnect between the forward looking assumptions about profitability by the early adopters in the space versus the actual returns once the speculation settles down and is replaced by hard data.

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

#569

Post by InsideOutSanta » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 10:36 AM UTC

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.

I'm not sure if physical products are analogous to internet services. If all it took to vacuum your house was typing "Hoover" into a browser, and everyone called vacuums "a Hoover," then I would expect Hoover to have 90% of the vacuum market share.

But since buying a vacuum usually involves going to a store, looking at available devices, and paying for them, the value of a brand name is less significant.

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

#570

Post by rightbyte » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 10:36 AM UTC

da_chicken wrote: post #334

iambateman wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is directionally right but to nitpick…Google has way more trust than OpenAI right now and it’s not close. Acceleration is felt, not velocity.

Yeah, I agree with you. Between Android, Chrome, YouTube, Gmail (including mx.google.com), Docs/Drive, Meet/Chat, and Google Search, claiming that Google "isn't more trusted" is just ludicrous. People may not be happy they have to trust Alphabet. But they certainly do. And even when they insist they're Stallman, their friends do, their family does, their coworkers do, the businesses they interact with do, the schools…

> And even when they insist they're Stallman

Looking through the JS-code of this site I was happily surprised finding 153 lines of not minified but pretty JS. I anticipated at least some unfree code. So I guess there is a chance some user might rightfully claim this.