Live data from Hacker News

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

techinasia.com

701–710 of 720 posts

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

#701
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…

> There's no product stickiness here. Very few of those 700,000,000 active users have ever heard of Claude or DeepSeek or ________. Gemini maybe .

[flagged]

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

#702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

my mom sees it as a nice internet bloke that helps her with writing emails. She once asked why it can't change background of her image from white to red if it can generate all that amazing art, and was genuinely disappointed that she can't get it to understand what she wants. You have skewed view on public perception on llms - they don't think about it, they just use it.

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

#703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen a tonnes of Chat GPT ads on Reddit. Usually with image generation of a dog in Japanese cartoon style.

This seems to be a common ad template for reddit ads, it's not just oai I've seen loads of ads use the this is fine template.

[dead]

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

#704
post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just said that everyone will be able to run a powerful AI locally and then you said this would lead to a pop of the bubble. Well, which is it? That AI is going to have huge demands for chips that it is going to get much bigger or is the bubble going to pop? You can’t have both. My opinion is that local LLMs will do a bulk of the low value interference such as your personal life mundane tasks. But cloud AI will be…

Just because a bubble pops on the economic front doesn't mean the sector goes away. Pets.com went bust a mere 10 months after going public, yet we're buying all kinds of products online in 2025 that we weren't in 2000. A bubble popping is about the disconnect between the forward looking assumptions about profitability by the early adopters in the space versus the actual returns once the speculation settles down and i…

If it pops and then people underestimated the impact of the technology even at the peak, was it really a bubble?

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

#705
post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

No, I just think it's outlandish to claim LLM's will never be as efficient as the search infrastructure companies like Google use. How can you possibly know that?

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

#706
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…

I am surprised something about Ads on HN is not downvoted into oblivion but actually top upvoted comment.

The pendulum is swinging back indeed!

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

#707
post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, I just think it's outlandish to claim LLM's will never be as efficient as the search infrastructure companies like Google use. How can you possibly know that?

Because the complexity an algorithms required to do search are a lot less than to run an LLM. Google ran well on 2000 level hardware. Could you run an LLM on 2000 level hardware? Are GPUs and equivalent hardware going to get as simple as CPUs

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

#708
post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I am not sure why or how this is missed, but because you cannot easily port context ( maybe yet ), the stickiness increases with every conversation assuming your questions are not encyclopedia type questions that don't need follow up.

Do you actually curate your contexts? I did in the early days, but I just create new ones now.

Hmm. You got me thinking. I rarely delete conversations, but I don't randomly engage either unless I am curious how llm will respond in a given scenario. For example, last time I was comparing how my output compared against some of the other online community. Maybe curate is too strong a word? Maybe I select for specific desired paths?

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

#709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh. Altman is not Musk in terms of negative coverage or average sentiment on the net. That might change in the future, but my personal guess is that your perception may be based on spending too much time in a specific echo chamber. I personally like to use people who don't use llms at all for a proper grounding. In those cases, Altman name does not exist, while Musk barely registers.

> Altman is not Musk in terms of negative coverage or average sentiment on the net. I can assure you that in Germany (where people are very sensitive with respect to privacy topics), Sam Altman (in particular because of his involvement with Worldcoin ("iris scanning" -> surveillance)) has a very bad reputation by many people.

Fair point. I was being too US-centric in my response.

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

#710
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…

ChatGPT (and all the competitors) are trivially sticky products: I have a lot of ongoing conversations in there, that I pick up all the time. Add more long term memory stuff — a direction I am sure they will keep pushing — and all of the sudden there is a lot of personal data that you rely on it having, that make the product better and that most people will never care to replicate/transfer. Just being the product tha…

technically you can export any single conversation and try to continue them in another LLM…

but migration of all this personal knowledge / context en masse is not convenient.

and i’m sure openai won’t make it easy to escape the little labyrinth they’re building for us

Post reply on HN