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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

#731

Post by alex43578 »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #686
irishcoffee wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> … 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?

Wouldn’t it be better for society if it were gated, at least compared to our current system which encourages those least able/suited to have children to have the greatest number of them? If we as a society are uncomfortable with society dictating how/when you have kids, society also shouldn’t be on the hook for providing for them - “no say, no pay”.

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

#732

Post by andrekandre »

nubg wrote: post #299
andrekandre wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But for most tasks, a fleet of tailor-made smaller models being called on by an agent seems like a solidly-precedented (albeit not singularity-triggering) bet. not an expert by any means, but wouldn't smaller but highly refined models also output more reproducible results? intuitively it sounds akin to the unix model...

But then again the main selling point of using LLMs as part of some code that solves a certain business need is that you don't have to finetune a usecase-specific model (like in the mid 2010s), you just prompt engineer a bit and it often magically works.

  > you just prompt engineer a bit and it often magically works
yea, i agree, thats the biggest selling point right now

i just get the feeling reproducibility, performance and cost will start to become more and more important as time goes on... jmo tho

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

#733

Post by knowriju »

wincy wrote: post #488
thisgetsit wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> copyright provides such a moat. Been saying this since the 2016 Alice case. Apple jumped into content production in 2017. They saw the long term value of copyright interests. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/08/apple... Alice changed things such that code monkeys algorithms were not patentable (except in some narrow cases where true runtime novelty can be established.) Since the transformers pape…

OpenAIs opsec must be amazing, I had fully expected some version of ChatGPT to be leaked on torrent sites at some point this year. How do you manage to avoid something that could be exfiltrated on a hard disk from escaping your servers in all cases, forever?

People who have had access to the raw weights of ChatGPT are worth more now (presumably millions in SBC) selling their credentials to other labs. Why bother with trying to leak ? In any case other labs catch-up to the capabilities within a few months.

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

#734

Post by parineum »

lenkite wrote: post #700
parineum wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the world?

Global poverty reduction has slowed to a near standstill, with 2020–2030 set to be a lost decade - World Bank. https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/ec3d46c25a822d6d248e86d... Please note that if you exclude China, the trend of poverty reduction is laughable.

> Global poverty reduction has slowed to a near standstill, with 2020–2030 set to be a lost decade - World Bank.

"Slowed to a near standstill" means it's still moving in the right direction.

There may have been some global event in the 2020s that maybe had a bit of an impact on the global economy.

> Please note that if you exclude China, the trend of poverty reduction is laughable.

If you exclude the area of the world that used to be extremely poor but has benefitted massively from the wealth generated by creating products for the billionaires abroad, why would you exclude that?

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

#735

Post by parineum »

pvtmert wrote: post #695
parineum wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand this perspective. What should be taxed? Amazon, as an example, has servers in country X. Country X taxes the transaction or the income from the server company. Amazon pays delivery drivers in country X to deliver goods, and the driver is taxed through various means (vehicle, fuel, payroll, etc). What is Amazon doing in country X that should be taxed?

Let me explain in-depth; > What should be taxed? Profits of the company, like all other (local) companies do. > Amazon, as an example, has servers in country X. Country X taxes the transaction or the income from the server company. Amazon has servers in Germany, Germany is unable to tax the transaction or income from Amazon, because; 1. The user completes a transaction either on Amazon (buying a product) or in AWS (r…

You can say amazon doesn't pay VAT but it's just as honest as saying Americans don't pay for tariffs

The consumer pays a certain price for a product and a portion of that money goes to taxes and costs to Amazon (including things that are taxed, like driver salaries and fuel). Those taxes are collected on the way from Amazon to the end user in every country they pass through, more or less.

Amazon is creating commerce that is taxed. They aren't skating by for free.

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

#736

Post by snigsnog »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #387
conartist6 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah except that models don't propel communities towards new heights. They drive towards the averages. They take from the best to give to the worst, so that as much value is destroyed as created. There's no virtuous cycle there...

Is that constraint fundamental to what they are? Or are they just reflecting the behavior of markets when there's low hanging fruit around? When you look at models that were built for a specific purpose, closely intertwined with experts who care about that purpose, they absolutely propel communities to new heights. Consider the impact of alphafold, it won a Nobel prize, proteomics is forever changed. The issue is tha…

I don't know anything about the field but apparently AlphaFold having "solved the problem of protein folding" is overhyped? https://old.reddit.com/r/bioinformatics/comments/1e0s55e/did...

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

#737

Post by yellowcake0 »

atombender wrote: post #538
Chyzwar wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic is building moat around theirs models with claude code, Agent SDK, containers, programmatic tool use, tool search, skills and more. Once you fully integrate you will not switch. Also being capital intensive is a form of moat. I think we will end up with market similar to cloud computing. Few big players with great margins creating cartel.

I thought that, too, but lately I've been using OpenCode with Claude Opus, rather than Claude Code, and have been loving it. OpenCode has LSPs out of the box (coming to Claude Code, but not there yet), has a more extensive UI (e.g. sidebar showing pending todos), allows me to switch models mid-chat, has a desktop app (Electron-type wrapper, sure, but nevertheless, desktop; and it syncs with the TUI/web versions so yo…

LibreOffice didn't replace MS Office, and Octave didn't replace Matlab. It seems to me that there is even less of a moat with these products than there is with Claude Code, yet neither was commoditized.

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

#738

Post by 650REDHAIR »

duxup wrote: post #690

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 profita…

This is such a bizarre page. Thanks for sharing!

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

#739

Post by moralestapia »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #112
HardCodedBias wrote: post #107

OpenAI has #5 traffic levels globally. Their product-market fit is undeniable. The question is monetization. Their cost to serve each request is roughly 3 orders of magnitude higher than conventional web sites. While it is clear people see value in the product, we only know they see value at today’s subsidized prices. It is possible that inference prices will continue their rapid decline. Or it is possible that OAI w…

It's easy to get product-market fit when you give away dollars for the price of pennies.

That's a cool sounding phrase you heard somewhere, unfortunately, it's not related with this at all.

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

#740

Post by runeks »

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,…

> The conclusion? AI is a world-changing technology, just like the railroads were, and it is going to soon explode in a huge bubble - just like the railroads did.

Why "soon"? All your arguments may be correct, but none of them imply when the pending implosion will happen.

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