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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

#671

Post by otterley »

sotix wrote: post #606
otterley wrote: post #168

That headline can't be correct. Income is revenues minus expenses (and a few other things). You can't have both an income and a loss at the same time. It's $4.3B in revenue .

I can only speak as a US CPA, but revenue and income are used interchangeably. You're thinking of net income or profit. It's certainly preferable to use the term revenue instead of income in my opinion however to avoid misunderstandings like this.

I think that's a tax thing (where revenues are treated as "income" for taxation purposes), not a financial accounting thing.

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

#672

Post by ceroxylon »

dwaltrip wrote: post #163
fred_is_fred wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deprecation only gets worse for them as they build-out, not better.

It gets worse until we hit the ceiling on what current tech is capable of. Then they can stop burning cash on enormous training runs and have a shot at becoming profitable.

This makes sense, but what happens when they stop burning cash on training runs and any of their competitors releases a better model that raises the ceiling?

They will have to train one that is comparable (or better), or the word will spread and users will move to the better model.

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

#674

Post by bobxmax »

lelandbatey wrote: post #250
bobxmax wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

They're not claiming that it's like the dot com boom because no one is actually making money. They're claiming that this is more like the dot com boom than the housing bubble, which I think is true . The dot com crash didn't cause Jane-on-the-street to lose her house while she worked a factory job, though the housing crisis did have those kinds of consumer-affecting outcomes.

It's nothing like the dot com bubble because that was based on speculative future value and zero present value. There is more present value in AI than at any point in software in the last 30 years.

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

#675

Post by prism56 »

sharkweek wrote: post #408
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.

I’ve got “normie” friends who I’d bet don’t even know that what Google has at the top of their search results is “AI” results and instead assume it’s just some extension of the normal search results we’ve all gotten used to (knowledge graph) Every one of them refers to using “ChatGPT” when talking about AI. How likely is it to stay that way? No idea, but OpenAI has clearly captured a notable amount of mindshare in th…

When I talk about any AI usage I do. I just say chatgpt to any friends.

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

#677

Post by 9rx »

Spooky23 wrote: post #659
9rx wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. UP…

> State-level

State-level...? You're starting to sound like the other commenter. It's a big world out there.

> National infrastructure is always subsidized

Much of the network was only local, and mostly subsidized by municipal governments.

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

#678

Post by AlecSchueler »

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…

> What prevents people from just using Altavista/Yahoo/[any other search engine].

Google shows the results you're looking for. At least this was true when they were in competition with the engines you mentioned, they had genuine quality advantage.

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

#679

Post by Agingcoder »

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…

I don’t want to use google anymore - bad search results, too many ads.

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

#680

Post by chermi »

buu700 wrote: post #495
Workaccount2 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believe it or not, the GPUs from bitcoin farms are often the most reliable. Since they were run 24/7, there was rarely the kind of heat stress that kills cards (heating and cooling cycles).

Could AI providers follow the same strategy? Just throw any spare inference capacity at something to make sure the GPUs are running 24/7, whether that's model training, crypto mining, protein folding, a "spot market" for non-time-sensitive/async inference workloads, or something else entirely.

I have to imagine some of them try this. I know you can schedule non-urgent work loads with some providers that run when compute space is available. With enough work loads like that, assuming they have well-defined or relatively predictable load/length, it would be a hard but approximately solvable optimization problem.
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