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

#621

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

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #522

bobxmax wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Do you mean pre-profit/without ever making a profit? I found an article about their IPO: > Pets.com lost $42.4 million during the fourth quarter last year on $5.2 million in sales. Since the company's inception in February of last year, it has lost $61.8 million on $5.8 million in sales. https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/pets-com-raises-82-5... They had sales, they were just making a massive loss. Isn’t that pr…

You'd think after all this time nerds would stop obsessing about profit. Profit doesn't matter. It hasn't mattered for a long time because tech companies have such fat margins they can go profitable in months if they wanted to.

Yes, $5m in sales. That's effectively pre-revenue for a tech company.

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

#622

Post by bobxmax » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 1:05 PM UTC

conartist6 wrote: post #608

bobxmax wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

What you're missing is how that value comes about. People seem to think it's an infinite fountain but it's more like strip mining the commons. We also know that AI hype is holding up most of the stock market this point, including the ticker symbols which you don't think of as being for "AI companies". Market optimism at large is coming from the idea that companies won't need employees soon, or that they can keep usin…

So that $500m in ARR in 3 months is from hype? That's what you're contending?

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

#623

Post by raw_anon_1111 » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 1:29 PM UTC

davedx wrote: post #573

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people always think that just because you have a lot of users it automatically translates to ad revenue? Yahoo has been one of the most trafficked site for decades and could never generate any reasonable amount of ad revenue. The other side of the coin is that running an LLM will never be as cheap as search engine.

> running an LLM will never be as cheap as search engine. Complete and unfounded speculation.

Really? You think that they are going to discover some magical algorithm that reduces the complexity of an LLM to a search?

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

#624

Post by otabdeveloper4 » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 1:40 PM UTC

dns_snek wrote: post #537

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's exactly how the wider public sees it.

It just turns out that the wider public loves peddling slop. (Not so much though when on the receiving end.)

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

#625

Post by kelvinjps10 » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 1:49 PM UTC

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #592

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. 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…

Most normal people don't know about these things they don't even know who Sam Altman is, for example my family that are not Americans they know about chat gpt but they don't know who Sam Altman is

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

#626

Post by MountDoom » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 1:56 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #486

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…

> All of these teens use Google Docs instead of OpenAI Docs, Google Meet instead of OpenAI Meet, Gmail instead of OpenAI Mail, etc. Google Docs, Google Meet and Gmail provide a tiny fraction of Google's overall revenue. And they're hardly integrated in with Google's humongous money maker, search, in a way that matters (Gmail has ads but my guess is that its direct revenue is tiny compared to search - the bigger value…

> Google Docs, Google Meet and Gmail provide a tiny fraction of Google's overall revenue.

I don't understand your argument here. Like Chrome and Android, these products exist to establish foothold, precisely so that Microsoft or OpenAI can't take Google's lunch.

My point is that brand recognition doesn't matter: if you can get equivalent functionality the easy way (a click of a button in Docs), you're not going to open a separate app and copy-and-paste stuff.

All of this will make it harder for OpenAI to maintain moat and stop burning money. Especially when their path to making money is to make LLMs worse (i.e., product placement / ads), while Google has more than enough income to let people enjoy untainted AI products for a very long time.

Even for search, right now, I'm pretty sure there are orders of magnitude more people relying on Google Search AI snippets than on ChatGPT. As these snippets get better and cover more queries, the reasons to talk to a chatbot disappear.

I'm not saying it's a forgone conclusion, but I think that OpenAI is at a pretty significant disadvantage.

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

#627

Post by kelvinjps10 » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 2:00 PM UTC

hiatus wrote: post #443

andyferris wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the beneficiary is wrong here. Those teens will grow up to work for organizaitons using Azure AD, Windows, Office and OneDrive/SharePoint/Teams. If any company is going to get the windfall of "AI provider by default" it is going to be Microsoft. Possibly powered by OpenAI models running on Azure. Google could make a "better" (basically - more sublime) advertising platform but little to attract new users. Perh…

> I think the beneficiary is wrong here. Those teens will grow up to work for organizaitons (sic) using Azure AD, Windows, Office and OneDrive/SharePoint/Teams. Idk, younger companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are using google.

If young people are mostly using google docs, sheets etc companies might adapt to use these, actually I already seen it happen

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

#628

Post by hoppp » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 2:01 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #349

hoppp wrote: post #336

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The moment they start mixing ads into responses Ill stop using them. Open models are good enough, its just more convenient to use chatgpt right now, but that can change.

> moment they start mixing ads into responses Ill stop using them Do you currently pay for it?

I do pay for openAi Api but its a top up, my main usage is on free tier.

I tried to pay for Claude but they didn't accept my credit card for some reason.

I have local models working well, but they are a bit slow, my laptop is 5 years old, but eventually when I buy a new one Ill make the switch.

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

#629

Post by hoppp » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 2:03 PM UTC

iLoveOncall wrote: post #588

hoppp wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moment they start mixing ads into responses Ill stop using them. Open models are good enough, its just more convenient to use chatgpt right now, but that can change.

> Open models are good enough Are they though? I have the best consumer hardware and can run most open models, and they are all unusable beyond basic text generation. I'm talking 90%+ hallucination rate.

Depends on the use-case. I like to generate front ends and there the hallucination is acceptable as html-css is pretty forgiving and I will manually modify it anyways

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

#630

Post by hoppp » Fri, Oct 03, 2025, 2:07 PM UTC

abnercoimbre wrote: post #365

Kranar wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People said the same thing about so many other online services since the 90s. The issue is that you're imagining ChatGPT as it exists right now with your current use case but just with ads inserted into their product. That's not really how these things go... instead OpenAI will wait until their product becomes so ingrained in everyday usage that you can't just decide to stop using them. It is possible, although not c…

And if/when they reach that point, the average consumer will see the ad as an irksome fly. That's it.

The ads can be subtile. Same way Claude today prefers to generate html with tailwindcss. Feels like an ad for tailwind as sometimes when I ask it to do something else it still just gives me tailwind