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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

#651

Post by t_sawyer »

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…

Google already has the ad network. They already have Gemini. IMO this will end up being OpenAI proving that the revenue model works and then Google will swoop in and take their market share away.

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

#652

Post by gomox »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #575
onion2k wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What prevents people from just using Google, who can build AI stuff into their existing massive search/ads/video/email/browser infrastructure? Google have never had a viable competitor. Their moat on Search and Ads has been so incredibly hard to beat that no one has even come close. That has given them an immense amount of money from search ads. That means they've appeared to be impossible to beat, but if you look at…

Aren't Chrome and Gmail also pretty much number one in their areas? I don't really use either one, but that's my impression. Also Android.

Chrome and Gmail don't really make any money for Google.

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

#653

Post by whizzter »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #389
whizzter wrote: post #130

Earlier 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.

What progress in gaming would that be? 2 generations of cards that amount to “just more of a fire hazard” and “idk bro just tell them to use more DLSS slop” to paper over actual card performance deficiencies. We have 3 generations of cards where 99% of games fall approximately into one of 2 categories: - indie game that runs on a potato - awfully optimised AAA-shitshow, which isn’t GPU bottlenecked most of the time a…

"DLSS"-slop is mostly because we're at a junction right now, raytracing is starting to make lighting simpler but isn't entirely there performance wise. Many advanced pre-raytracing methods are quite work/tweak intensive (many simply doing screenspace raytracing in shaders without the hardware support).

My point is that it could be far worse if they get in trouble and get bought out by some actor like Qualcomm that might see PC GPU's as a sideshow.

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

#654

Post by remorse_jaunty »

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…

For consumer product, memory, the recent pulse one and _much awaited_ ai feed are the products that will build stickiness. I pay for both claude and openai currently and it is much more difficult to continue a chat on other platform as the context systems isn’t something i can cook up swiftly.

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

#655

Post by t_sawyer »

rajaman0 wrote: post #371
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…

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.

While I agree, we saw this play out with Dropbox too.

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

#656

Post by fennecbutt »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #589
fennecbutt wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ain't never hearda rag

There is no evidence that RAG delivers equivalent performance to retraining on new data. Merely having information in the context window is very different from having it baked into the model weights. Relying solely on RAG to keep model results current would also degrade with time, as more and more information would have to be incorporated into the context window the longer it's been since the knowledge cutoff date.

I honestly do not think that we should be training models to regurgitate training data anyway.

Humans do this to a minimum degree, but the things that we can recount from memory are simpler than the contents of an entire paper, as an example.

There's a reason we invented writing stuff down. And I do wonder if future models should be trying to optimise for rag with their training; train for reasoning and stringing coherent sentences together, sure, but with a focus on using that to connect hard data found in the context.

And who says models won't have massive or unbounded contexts in the future? Or that predicting a single token (or even a sub-sequence of tokens) still remains a one shot/synchronous activity?

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

#657

Post by wltr »

anon1395 wrote: post #549
wltr wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even I often tell I chatgeepeeteed the result, in the same fashion when I continue saying I googled the result, while actually I used Duck Duck Go. I could ask another LLM provider, but I have no idea how to communicate that properly to a non-technical folks. Heck, I don’t want to communicate that _properly_ to tech peers either. I don’t like these pedantic phrases ‘well, actually … that wasn’t Google, I used DDG for…

>I asked AI doesn't sound right for me. That's a you thing.

Hey, but it’s not AI!

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

#658

Post by voakbasda »

parineum wrote: post #615
boston_clone wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

My wife asked for information about a product, and ChatGPT fed her a handful of blatant product ads. She told the AI never to do that again, and that was the last time she saw that format of output.

I would wager that she was part of an A/B testing group, so her instruction may not have any real effect. However, we were both appalled by that output and immediately discussed alternative AI options, should such a change become permanent.

This isn’t the rise of Google, where they have a vastly superior product and can boil us frogs by slowly serving us more and more ads. We are already boiling mad from having become hypersensitive to products wholly tainted by ads.

We ain’t gunna take it anymore.

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

#659

Post by Spooky23 »

9rx wrote: post #249
Spooky23 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Railroads were pretty profitable for a long time. The western long haul routes were capitalized by land transfers. What killed them was the same thing that killed marine shipping — the government put the thumb on the scale for trucking and cars to drive postwar employment and growth of suburbs, accelerate housing development, and other purposes.

> the government put the thumb on the scale for trucking and cars to drive postwar employment and growth of suburbs, accelerate housing development, and other purposes. The age of postwar suburb growth would be more commonly attributed to WWII, but the records show these railroads were already losing money hand over fist by the WWI era. The final death knell, if there ever was one, was almost certainly the Great Depr…

There was alot of complexities. It's hard to really understand the true position of these businesses in modern terms. Operationally, they would often try to over-represent losses because the interstate commerce commission and other State-level entities mandated services, especially short-haul passenger service that become irrelevant.

National infrastructure is always subsidized and is never profitable on it's own. UPS is the largest trucking company, but their balance sheet doesn't reflect the costs of enabling their business. The area I grew up in had tarred gravel roads exclusively until the early 1980s -- they have asphalt today because the Federal government subsidizes the expense. The regulatory and fiscal scale tipped to automotive and to a lesser extent aircraft. It's arguable whether that was good or bad, but it is.

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

#660

Post by rdtsc »

infecto wrote: post #617
rdtsc wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My claim that initially it was a lot further down the road, now it's a lot less further. Initially Google fumbled for sure but they are catching up quickly.
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