How in the world is openAI supposed to pay for the deals for infra ? 300B with oracle for one.
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
#642How in the world is openAI supposed to pay for the deals for infra ? 300B with oracle for one.
with nvidia's money
Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss
#643Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Right, because just like the Amazon case, potential competitors didn't realize at the time what a threat it was, and so they gave Google a 15-year head start (Microsoft half-heartedly made "Live Search" circa 2007 and didn't really get at all serious about Bing until ~2010).
That's very different from the world where everyone immediately realized what a threat Chat-GPT was and instantly began pouring billions into competitor products; if that had happened with search+adtech in 1998, I think Google would have had no moat and search would've been a commoditized "function (query: String): String" service.
Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss
#644I 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…
We gave ChatGPT advertising on bus-stops here in the UK. Two people in a cafe having a meet-up, they are both happy, one is holding a phone and they are both looking at it. And it has a big ChatGPT logo in the top right corner of the advertisement - transparent just the black logo with ChatGPT written underneath. That's it. No text or anything telling you what the product is or does. Just it will make you happy durin…
Seems like an ad trying to stir up fear of missing out.
Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss
#645Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the empirical answer is no. Look at how many ads there are in everything and people still use it.
Normal people ignore ads. It gets easier with time. Television with ads means conversation about what we just watched.
How do you ignore ads when you ask for a recipe and it suggests using ingredients, due to their superior flavors, textures, ability to mesh with the other ingredients, etc? Sure, you can decide to go with another brand, but over time, that stuff has the ability to stick in your brain. There have been many billions sunk into how to psychologically manipulate humans to get them to come buy your products, for instance McDs figured out decades ago through research that by giving away free toys in children's meals, the kids will whine and pester parents after seeing a commercial for a new toy from the latest superhero movie they just saw. Some parents will say no, but enough parents, after a long day/week of working will just give in.
Sure my example of asking for a recipe is contrived but imagine that for every query you make, that AI suggests using this framework for your web development, or basically any query you can think of will make subtle suggestions to use a specific product with compelling reasons why e.g. the competition has known bugs that will affect you personally!
The possibilities are endless.
Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss
#646Earlier quoted context omitted.
Zuck isn't throwing 100M comps at many people (maybe 1 or 2 at most?), that's a myth that was debunked.
It’s debatable that it was debunked. There was squirrelly wording about some specific claims. One person was reported to have been offered a package worth a billion dollars, which even if exaggerated was probably not exaggerated by 10x. The numbers line up when you consider that AI startup founders and early employees stand to potentially make well into 9 figures if not higher, and Meta is trying to cut them off at t…
>was probably not exaggerated by 10x.
"The people spreading obvious lies must have a reasonable basis in their lying"?
Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss
#647Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really hope NVidia doesn't get too comfortable with the AI incomes, would be sad to see all progress in gaming disappear.
Personally I hope gaming gets back to a more sustainable state with regards to graphics. (i.e. lower production costs because you don’t need 1000 employees to build out a realistic world)
That'll never happen, but I think raytracing will make some work easier. A lot of lighting stuff that has been baked,hand-tuned,etc can just be run as a general model, we're not entirely there yet but soon enough.
Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss
#648Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is an exceptionally obvious solution for OpenAI & ChatGPT: ads. In fact it's an unavoidable solution. There is no future for OpenAI that doesn't involve a gigantic, highly lucrative ad network attached to ChatGPT. One of the dumbest things in tech at present is OpenAI not having already deployed this. It's an attitude they can't actually afford to maintain much longer. Ads are a hyper margin product that are ve…
No way. It’s 2025, society is totally different, you have to think about what is the new normal. They are too big to fail at this point — so much of the S&P 500 valuation is tied to AI (Microsoft, Google, Tesla, etc) they are arguable strategic to the US. Fascist corporatism will throw them in for whatever Intel rescue plan Nvidia is forced to participate in. If the midterms flip congress or if we have another presid…
I agree. If OpenAI isn't strategic to the US, that damn sure is Altman's current goal. The moment he can close the sale on "we have to get there before China" ad revenue won't be a concern any more.
I'd say it's a bit of a Hail Mary and could go either way, but that's as an outsider looking in. Who really knows?
Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss
#649Earlier quoted context omitted.
Normal people ignore ads. It gets easier with time. Television with ads means conversation about what we just watched.
How do you ignore ads when you ask for a recipe and it suggests using ingredients, due to their superior flavors, textures, ability to mesh with the other ingredients, etc? Sure, you can decide to go with another brand, but over time, that stuff has the ability to stick in your brain. There have been many billions sunk into how to psychologically manipulate humans to get them to come buy your products, for instance M…
Maybe that will end up being viable in the US, but I’m pretty sure it would remain illegal in the EU. There’s a reason why sponsored content has to be marked as such.
Re: OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss
#650I 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…
Brand name and ChatGPT being the synonym of AI. Just like google is a synonym for search. That right there is very powerful.