OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

Post by mbesto » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 12:28 PM UTC

jotras wrote: post #396

avalys wrote: post #139

AI is going to be a highly-competitive, extremely capital-intensive commodity market that ends up in a race to the bottom competing on cost and efficiency of delivering models that have all reached the same asymptotic performance in the sense of intelligence, reasoning, etc. The simple evidence for this is that everyone who has invested the same resources in AI has produced roughly the same result. OpenAI, Anthropic,…

Something nobody's talking about: OpenAI's losses might actually be attractive to certain investors from a tax perspective. Microsoft and other corporate investors can potentially use their share of OpenAI's operating losses to offset their own taxable income through partnership tax treatment. It's basically a tax-advantaged way to fund R&D - you get the loss deductions now while retaining upside optionality later. T…

Post by thimabi » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 12:32 PM UTC

sothatsit wrote: post #435

therobots927 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google already puts AI summaries at the top of search. It would be trivial for them to incorporate shopping. And they have infinitely more traffic than OpenAI does. I just don’t see how OpenAI could possibly compete with that. What are you seeing that I’m not?

ChatGPT has already won a lot of people away from Google like my mum, who now defaults to ChatGPT when she has a question. I was just talking to one of their friends last night who is in his 90s and he loves using Perplexity to learn about cooking and gardening. A lot of people now reach for ChatGPT by default instead of Google, even with the AI summaries. I wonder whether they just prefer the interface of the chat a…

Post by shaky-carrousel » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 12:50 PM UTC

aurareturn wrote: post #481

shaky-carrousel wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of these have ads. And none of these have an equal value alternative. OpenAI, Claude, Deepseek, Mistral, Gemini, are mostly the same to a regular user.

Bing is mostly the same. Kagi is mostly the same. Yahoo, Yandex, etc. It's 2025. Hardly any difference. There were tens of search engines in the 90s and 2000s that were generally mostly the same. Yet, Google still won and owned nearly all search monetization. Search was even easier to switch. At least ChatGPT has memory. Most chat apps are the same as Whatsapp. All of them are free too. "Ask ChaGPT" is the equivalent…

Post by croes » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 1:03 PM UTC

Chyzwar wrote: post #431

avalys wrote: post #139

AI is going to be a highly-competitive, extremely capital-intensive commodity market that ends up in a race to the bottom competing on cost and efficiency of delivering models that have all reached the same asymptotic performance in the sense of intelligence, reasoning, etc. The simple evidence for this is that everyone who has invested the same resources in AI has produced roughly the same result. OpenAI, Anthropic,…

Anthropic is building moat around theirs models with claude code, Agent SDK, containers, programmatic tool use, tool search, skills and more. Once you fully integrate you will not switch. Also being capital intensive is a form of moat. I think we will end up with market similar to cloud computing. Few big players with great margins creating cartel.

Post by lotsofpulp » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 1:13 PM UTC

jdiez17 wrote: post #562

lotsofpulp wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment makes even less sense than jotras’ comment. Pension funds buy shares in businesses such as Microsoft. The money going into the pension fund is not typically a function of the tax paid by companies such as Microsoft, but rather from a combination of actuaries’ recommendations, payroll tax receipts, and politicians’ priorities. Therefore a pension funds’ equity holdings, such as Microsoft, doing well means…

If only my country (Germany)’s pension fund was capital/stock based.