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

#611

Post by bpt3 » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 12:22 PM UTC

netdevphoenix wrote: post #555

asa400 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Google's competitive moat 20-25 years ago was being a significantly better search engine than the alternatives. That remained true for decades.

You can't say the same about ChatGPT. And Google wasn't spending $4 to make $1 almost 10 years after its founding, which will become an issue at some point.

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

#612

Post by gmerc » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 12:22 PM UTC

sieve wrote: post #527

viking123 wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ab…

Surely someone has abliterated it by now

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

#613

Post by gmerc » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 12:24 PM UTC

fennecbutt wrote: post #566

necovek wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh please

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

#614

Post by aleph_minus_one » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 12:28 PM UTC

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote: post #601

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ChatGPT has a phenomenal brand. My observation is different: ChatGPT may be well-known, but does not have a really good reputation anymore (I'd claim that it is in average of equal dubious reputation as Google) in particular in consideration of - a lot of public statements and actions of Sam Altman (in particular his involvement into Worldcoin (iris scanning) makes him untolerable for being the CEO of a company tha…

Eh. Altman is not Musk in terms of negative coverage or average sentiment on the net. That might change in the future, but my personal guess is that your perception may be based on spending too much time in a specific echo chamber. I personally like to use people who don't use llms at all for a proper grounding. In those cases, Altman name does not exist, while Musk barely registers.

> Altman is not Musk in terms of negative coverage or average sentiment on the net.

I can assure you that in Germany (where people are very sensitive with respect to privacy topics), Sam Altman (in particular because of his involvement with Worldcoin ("iris scanning" -> surveillance)) has a very bad reputation by many people.

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

#615

Post by parineum » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 12:39 PM UTC

boston_clone wrote: post #497

parineum wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They have 700 million weekly users and growing much faster than Google. Years old company growing faster than decades old company! 2.5 billion people use Gmail. I assume people check their mail (and, more importantly, receive mail) much more often than weekly. ChatGPT has a lot of growing to do to catch up, even if it's faster

I read that as OpenAI’s WAU is showing a steeper increase than Google ever did. Not saying it’s factually accurate, just that it’s not a fixed point-in-time comparison :)

The focus on WAU is a tell though. How much data can OpenAI use for advertising if I interact with it weekly?

When I ask about which toaster is best, is it going to show me ads for a motorcycle because that's what I asked about last week?

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

#616

Post by nasmorn » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 12:50 PM UTC

gopheryourshelf wrote: post #496

jandy wrote: 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.

I know a lot of people who refer to it as ChatGTP which I assume stands for German treebrained performers

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

#617

Post by infecto » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 12:56 PM UTC

rdtsc wrote: post #276

brandon272 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point is not that everyone is throwing away their ChatGPT subscriptions and getting DeepSeek Currently.

Exactly, right? It went from "OpenAI seems like years ahead" to "well, maybe if DeepSeek can do it so can we, let's try".

Yet your original statement still lack meaning, at least for me. Years down the road and OpenAI is still leading on the consumer front which is also where all these valuations are coming from.

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

#618

Post by infecto » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 12:57 PM UTC

brandon272 wrote: post #274

rdtsc wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does DeepSeek have any market penetration in the US? Does Google? What about Meta? Claude is popular with developers, too. Amazon? There I am not sure what they are doing with the LLMs. ("Alexa, are you there?"). I guess they are just happy selling shovels, that's good enough too. The point is not that everyone is throwing away their ChatGPT subscriptions and getting DeepSeek, the point is that DeepSeek was the fir…

> The point is not that everyone is throwing away their ChatGPT subscriptions and getting DeepSeek Currently.

Certainly but also the OP was making Ana argument that DeepSeek proved something and I am arguing that most of this market is not valuing on the model but the consumer commercial offering.

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

#619

Post by moralestapia » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 12:57 PM UTC

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 OpenAI's competitive moat?

The broken record's still running, someone please turn it off!

At this point I think people just suffer from some sort of borderline mental disorder.

700 MAUs in just a couple years? In a red(-pretty-much-pure-blood) ocean? Against companies who've been in the business for 20 years?

One would have to be quite dumb or obtuse not to see it.

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

#620

Post by bobxmax » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 1:02 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #421

bobxmax wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

1. Claude Code is claimed to have hit €500m ARR in 3 months. 2. What is the Claude Code profit for the same period? 3. What is the Claude Code profit per request served when excluding fixed expenses such as training the models?

Who cares? Are you not seeing the exponential decrease in GPU inference costs? H100s costs 3x what they did a year ago.