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OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

economist.com

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Re: OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

#681

Post by aleph_minus_one »

yossi_peti wrote: post #556
well_ackshually wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your accountants suggest that you take a single 5% chance deal, they probably skipped maths and statistics and you should fire them. It's the dumb as rocks MBAs that will go head first into the 5% chance deal.

I guess the reasoning assumes that you have multiple eggs in your basket. A 95% chance of failure is bad if you're pinning the whole business on it, but if you have a variety of 5% chance deals, then it can make sense to pursue them, which is basically what venture capitalists do.

> A 95% chance of failure is bad if you're pinning the whole business on it, but if you have a variety of 5% chance deals, then it can make sense to pursue them

This is only true if the probability distributions for the values of the individual deals are rather uncorrelated (or even better: stochastically mostly independent).

Re: OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

#682

Post by wyre »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #273
andrekandre wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

maybe not allow google to bundle gemini with chrome?

So should we also not allow OpenAI to bundle the OpenAI model with the ChatGPT app Absolutely no one besides ChromeOS users are forced to use Chrome.

Anti-trust doesn’t have to involve force, but monopolistic behavior.

Google has spent over a decade advertising Chrome on all their properties and has an unlimited budget and active desire to keep Chrome competitive. Mozilla famously needs Google’s sponsorship to stay solvent. Apple maintains Safari to have no holes in their ecosystem.

Stop being silly defending trillion dollar companies that are actively making the internet worse, it’s not productive or funny.

Re: OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

#683

Post by conartist6 »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #665
conartist6 wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Experts making a specialized model isn't an example of an AI contributing value to society. All the value a model can offer comes from one of exactly two places: the person building the model, or the people the model trained on. We know that the model training on the model training on the model leads to model collapse...

Your word choice implies a very zero-sum perspective on value. Value is determined by what we value, it's a choice. If a bunch of scientists value good approximations for how a protein will fold, and then a model generates more such things in a year than those scientists could make in a century, that's a lot of value. Not extracted from anyone, created.

Yes. Value created by the people who made the data the model trained on, and the people who ensured that the training created a good model. I'm just saying it's not magic, just another kind of high-level work that people do.

Re: OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

#684

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

jotras wrote: post #396
avalys wrote: post #139

AI is going to be a highly-competitive, extremely capital-intensive commodity market that ends up in a race to the bottom competing on cost and efficiency of delivering models that have all reached the same asymptotic performance in the sense of intelligence, reasoning, etc. The simple evidence for this is that everyone who has invested the same resources in AI has produced roughly the same result. OpenAI, Anthropic,…

Something nobody's talking about: OpenAI's losses might actually be attractive to certain investors from a tax perspective. Microsoft and other corporate investors can potentially use their share of OpenAI's operating losses to offset their own taxable income through partnership tax treatment. It's basically a tax-advantaged way to fund R&D - you get the loss deductions now while retaining upside optionality later. T…

> Something nobody's talking about

Nobody is talking about this because it's not a thing.

People here will shit on LLMs all day for being confidently incorrect, then upvote aggressively financially illiterate comments like this.

Re: OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

#685

Post by RandallBrown »

famouswaffles wrote: post #432
RandallBrown wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do understand why it makes it very hard to compare but it's certainly not meaningless. Google's AI overviews are pretty much the only way that I use AI.

I mean we're all talking about how Google is 'catching up' and 'taking over' Open AI right ? In that case, it genuinely is meaningless. AI Overviews, even if it had the usage OP assumes, is not a threat to Open AI or chatGPT. People use chatGPT for a lot of different things, and AI overviews only handles (rather poorly in my opinion) a small, limited part of the kind of things it gets used for. I use AI mode a lot. I…

I guess I use Google's AI that's built into their search engine the same way I've used ChatGPT or Claude. I ask it a question and it provides me an answer. I can then interact with it further if I want or look through the rest of the search results.

Re: OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

#686

Post by Ar-Curunir »

irishcoffee wrote: post #626
epolanski wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It shouldn't be the job of the US taxpayer to feed someone that doesn't want to work, study, or pass a drug test This would make sense if every person was given similar opportunities, like providing quality education to all of our youngest and making higher education a mission rather than a business as a starter. As a society we move at the speed of the weakest among us, we only move forward when we start lifting a…

> … into fighting the causes that make many fall into that? A morbid thought that would probably address the bulk of this: male birth control. The backlash would be profound, it’ll never happen. But if there were a way to make a “perfect pill/shot/procedure” boys had maybe at birth to prevent unplanned pregnancies… just think about it. I’m not even sure I’m advocating for it. Everyone says “education will fix all the…

And that wouldn’t be abused? We already means test access to basic necessities; you don’t think “access to producing offspring” wouldn’t be similarly gated?

Re: OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

#687

Post by snet0 »

nateb2022 wrote: post #162
avalys wrote: post #139

AI is going to be a highly-competitive, extremely capital-intensive commodity market that ends up in a race to the bottom competing on cost and efficiency of delivering models that have all reached the same asymptotic performance in the sense of intelligence, reasoning, etc. The simple evidence for this is that everyone who has invested the same resources in AI has produced roughly the same result. OpenAI, Anthropic,…

> AI is going to be a highly-competitive, extremely capital-intensive commodity market It already is. In terms of competition, I don't think we've seen any groundbreaking new research or architecture since the introduction of inference time compute ("thinking") in late 2024/early 2025 circa GPT-o4. The majority of the cost/innovation now is training this 1-2 year old technology on increasingly large amounts of conten…

I haven't read much about it to understand what's going on, but the development of multi-modal models has also felt like a major step. Being able to paste an image into a chat and have it "understand" the image to a comparable extent to language is very powerful.

Re: OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

#688

Post by tim333 »

zeofig wrote: post #405
avalys wrote: post #139

AI is going to be a highly-competitive, extremely capital-intensive commodity market that ends up in a race to the bottom competing on cost and efficiency of delivering models that have all reached the same asymptotic performance in the sense of intelligence, reasoning, etc. The simple evidence for this is that everyone who has invested the same resources in AI has produced roughly the same result. OpenAI, Anthropic,…

I still don't understand how it's world-changing apart from considerably degrading the internet. It's laughable to compare it to railroads.

When it gets a bit better two robots can make four robots and so on to infinity.

Re: OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

#689

Post by throw310822 »

lm28469 wrote: post #662
throw310822 wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand the spirit, though this reinforces my impression that the product is so good that people jump through hoops to use it, even if they hate it in principle. If they suddenly cut off any free access to it, how much would you be willing to pay per month to keep using it? One dollar? Ten? Twenty? Also, maybe I'm missing something, but no amount of free accounts on ChatGPT gives you what you get with a paid…

I like movies, I still torrent them, if tomorrow a police officer is being my back 24/7 I will just stop torrenting, but I still won't pay $20 a pop to go to the cinema. > Also, maybe I'm missing something, but no amount of free accounts on ChatGPT gives you what you get with a paid subscription, especially with a $200 one These days I'm mostly running opus 4.5 through "antigravity" and I'd rather become a potatoe fa…

It's a really tiresome conversation, and I should just stop replying, but...

If you have to stop torrenting it doesn't mean that you have to pay $20 per movie. There is a price >0 that you're willing to pay to do something you love. On youtube there's a lot of movies for 4 or 5 dollars.

I'm also using Claude, both through Cursor (paid by my company) and privately (paid by me, $20/ month).

Re: OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

#690

Post by duxup »

Their acquisition of Jony Ive's organization for a ton of money and that creepy webpage https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/ makes me think OpenAI is just racing for headlines and groping in the dark for some magic fairy dust.

ChatGPT isn't bad, I use it for some things / pay for it, but their spend and moves make me think that they don't seem confidant in it ...

Is all the doomer-ism about AI companies not being profitable right? Do the AI companies believe it? Seems like it sometimes.

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