17 ms·

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

• sharadov 1y ago
  You can now buy stuff from chatgpt as they have started showing ads in their search results. That's a source of revenue right there.
  • simonw 1y ago
    Is that true? I heard that they've integrated checkout, but I didn't know they had ads. Here's information about checkout inside ChatGPT: https://openai.com/index/buy-it-in-chatgpt/ https://openai.com/index/buy-it-in-chatgpt/
    • makestuff 1y ago
      "Each merchant pays a small fee". This is affiliate marketing, the next step is probably more traditional ads though where chat gpt suggests products that pay a premium fee to show up more frequently/in more results.
• koolba 1y ago
  "We lose money on every sale, but make it up in volume!"
  • hn_throw_250926 1y ago
    [flagged]
• NooneAtAll3 1y ago
  > US$2.5 billion on stock-based compensation um...
  • chevman 1y ago
    Never having worked for a company in a position like OpenAI, how does this manifest in the real world as actual comp? Like I get 50,000 shares deposited in to my Fidelity account, worth $2 each, but i can't sell them or do anything with them?
    • xuki 1y ago
      It's just an entry on some computer. Maybe you can sell it on a secondary market, maybe you can't. You have to wait for an exit event - being acquired by someone else, or an IPO.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • changoplatanero 1y ago
      You got the right idea there. They wouldn't actually show up in your Fidelity account but there would be a different website where you can log in and see your shares. You wouldn't be able to sell them or transfer them anywhere unless the company arranges a sale and invites you to participate in it.
    • antognini 1y ago
      I can't speak to OpenAI's specific setup, but a lot of startups will use a third party service like Carta to manage their cap table. So there's a website, you have an account, you can log in and it tells you that you have a grant of X shares that vests over Y months. You have to sign a form to accept the grant. There might be some option to do an 83b election if you have stock options rather than RSUs. But that's about it.
    • zzbzq 1y ago
      In my experience owning private stock, you basically own part of a pool. (Hopefully the exact same classes of shares as the board has or else it's a scam.) The board controls the pool, and whenever they do dividends or transfer ownership, each person's share is affected proportionally. You can petition the board to buy back your shares or transfer them to another shareholder but that's probably unusual for a rank-and-file employee. The shares are valued by an accounting firm auditor of some type. This determines the basis value if you're paying taxes up-front. After that the tax situation should be the same as getting publicly traded options/shares, there's some choices in how you want to handle the taxes but generally you file a special tax form at the year of grant.
  • elamje 1y ago
    this hides major dilution until future financings best to treat it like an expense from the perspective of shareholders
• hmate9 1y ago
  $2.5B in stock comp for about 3,000 employees. that’s roughly $830k per person in just six months. Almost 60% of their revenue went straight back to staff.
  • tomasphan 1y ago
    That’s how it should be, spread the wealth.
    • onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
      Spreading illiquid wealth *
      • BhavdeepSethi 1y ago
        Funny since they have a tender offer that hits their accounts on Oct 7.
      • gk1 1y ago
        They’ve had multiple secondary sales opportunities in the past few years, always at a higher valuation. By this point, if someone who’s been there >2 years hasn’t taken money off the table it’s most likely their decision. I don’t work there but know several early folks and I’m absolutely thrilled for them.
        • chermi 1y ago
          Secondaries open to all shareholds are on upward trend across start-ups. I think it's a fantastic trend.
      • Der_Einzige 1y ago
        Oh no, "greedy" AI researchers defrauding way greedier VCs and billionaires!
      • yieldcrv 1y ago
        private secondary markets are pretty liquid for momentum tech companies, there is an entire cottage industry of people making trusts to circumvent any transfer restrictions employees are very liquid if they want to be, or wait a year for the next 10x in valuation
• munk-a 1y ago
  The news about how much money Nvidia is investing just so that OpenAI can pay Oracle to pay Nvidia is especially concerning - we seem to be arriving at the financial shell games phase of the bubble.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• JCM9 1y ago
  These numbers are pretty ugly. You always expect new tech to operate at a loss initially but the structure of their losses is not something one easily scales out of. In fact it gets more painful as they scale. Unless something fundamentally changes and fast this is gonna get ugly real quick.
  • spacebanana7 1y ago
    The real answer is in advertising/referral revenue. My life insurance broker got £1k in commission, I think my mortgage broker got roughly the same. I’d gladly let OpenAI take the commission if ChatGPT could get me better deals.
    • lkramer 1y ago
      This could be solved with comparison websites which seems to be exactly what those brokers are using anyway. I had a broker proudly declare that he could get me the best deal, which turned out to be exactly the same as what moneysavingexperts found for me. He wanted £150 for the privilege of searching some DB + god knows how much commission he would get on top of that...
      • spacebanana7 1y ago
        Even if ChatGPT becomes the new version of a comparison site over its existing customer base, that’s a great business.
    • ecommerceguy 1y ago
      Insurance agents—unlike many tech-focused sales jobs—are licensed and regulated, requiring specific training, background checks, and ongoing compliance to sell products that directly affect customers’ financial stability and wellbeing. Mortgage brokers also adhere to licensing and compliance regulations, and their market expertise, negotiation ability, and compliance duties are not easily replaced by AI tools or platforms. t. perplexity ai
      • 1y ago
• measurablefunc 1y ago
  They went from creating abundant utopias to cat videos w/ ads really fast. Never let anyone tell you capitalist incentives don't work.
• myth_drannon 1y ago
  One negative signal, no matter how small, will send the market into a death spiral. That will happen in a matter of hours.
  • bitexploder 1y ago
    The negative spiral will take hours or you are predicting a company ending negative signal will soon appear in a matter of hours?
  • gizajob 1y ago
    There’s been loads of these signals and the market keeps ignoring them.
    • ares623 1y ago
      Because everyone knows that there’s no where else to go.
      • rhetocj23 1y ago
        Exactly. The opportunity set isnt large. The best play for all portfolio managers is to froth up the stock price and take their returns later. Everyone knows this a bubble but the returns at the end of this of those who time it are juicy - portfolio managers have no choice to be in this game because those who supply the money they invest on their behalf, demand it. Its that simple.
    • myth_drannon 1y ago
      I will always remember Jim Cramer's melt down https://youtu.be/SWksEJQEYVU https://youtu.be/SWksEJQEYVU Not saying that will happen, but it's always good to rewatch just as a reminder how bad things can get.
      • rhetocj23 1y ago
        wow that energy lol!
• Analemma_ 1y ago
  Seems like despite all the doom about how they were about to be "disrupted", Google might have the last laugh here: they're still quite profitable despite all the Gemini spending, and could go way lower with pricing until OAI and Anthropic have to tap out.
  • thewebguyd 1y ago
    Google also has the advantage of having their own hardware. They aren't reliant on buying Nvidia, and have been developing and using their TPUs for a long time. Google's been an "AI" company since forever
• Havoc 1y ago
  I'd be pretty worried as a shareholder. Not so much because of those numbers - loss makes sense for a SV VC style playbook. ...but rather that they're doing that while Chinese competitors are releasing models in vaguely similar ballpark under Apache license. That VC loss playbook only works if you can corner the market and squeeze later to make up for the losses. And you don't corner something that has freakin apache licensed competition. I suspect that's why the SORA release has social media style vibes. Seeking network effects to fix this strategic dilemma. To be clear I still think they're #1 technically...but the gap feels too small strategically. And they know it. That recent pivot to a linkedin competitor? SORA with socials? They're scrambling on market fit even though they lead on tech
  • beepbopboopp 1y ago
    Eh, distribution of the model is the real moat, theyre doing 700m WAU of the most financially valuable users on earth. If they truly become search, commerce and can use their model either via build or license across b2b, theyre the largest company on earth many times over.
    • Havoc 1y ago
      >distribution of the model is the real moat, theyre doing 700m WAU of the most financially valuable users on earth. Distribution isn't a moat if the thing being distributed is easily substitutable. Everything under the sun is OAI API compatible these days. 700 WAU are fickle AF when a competitor offers a comparable product for half the price. Moat needs to be something more durable. Cheaper, Better, some other value added tie in (hardware / better UI / memory). There needs to be some edge here. And their obvious edge - raw tech superiority...is looking slim.
      • gizmodo59 1y ago
        Not necessarily. I’m sure there is many cheaper android phones that are technically better in specs but many users won’t change. Once you are familiar, bought into the ecosystem getting rid of it is very hard. I’m lazy myself compared to how I was several years ago. The curious and experimental folks are a minority and the majority ll stick with what works initially instead of constantly analyzing what’s best all the time
• seneca 1y ago
  This link appears to be dead. Do we have a healthy source?
• codegeek 1y ago
  I am curious to see how this compares against where Amazon was in 2000. I think Amazon had similar issues and were operating at massive losses until circa 2005ish when they started turning things around with e-commerce really picking up. If the revenue keeps going up and losses keep going down, it may reach that inflection point in a few years. For that to happen, the cost of AI datacenter have to go down massively.
  • pavlov 1y ago
    Amazon's loss in 2000 was 6% of sales. OpenAI's loss in 2025 is 314% of sales. https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/annual/00ar.pdf https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/annual/0... "Ouch. It’s been a brutal year for many in the capital markets and certainly for Amazon.com shareholders. As of this writing, our shares are down more than 80% from when I wrote you last year. Nevertheless, by almost any measure, Amazon.com the company is in a stronger position now than at any time in its past. "We served 20 million customers in 2000, up from 14 million in 1999. "• Sales grew to $2.76 billion in 2000 from $1.64 billion in 1999. "• Pro forma operating loss shrank to 6% of sales in Q4 2000, from 26% of sales in Q4 1999. "• Pro forma operating loss in the U.S. shrank to 2% of sales in Q4 2000, from 24% of sales in Q4 1999."
  • JCM9 1y ago
    Fundamentally different business models. Amazon had huge capital investments that got less painful as it scaled. Amazon also focuses on cash flow vs profit. Even early on it generated a lot of cash, it just reinvested that back into the business which meant it made a “loss” on paper. OpenAI is very different. Their “capital” expense depreciation (model development) has a really ugly depreciation curve. It’s not like building a fulfillment network that you can use for decades. That’s not sustainable for much longer. They’re simply burning cash like there’s no tomorrow. Thats only being kept afloat by the AI bubble hype, which looks very close to bursting. Absent a quick change, this will get really ugly.
    • Analemma_ 1y ago
      Not to mention nobody bothered chasing Amazon-- by the time potential competitors like Walmart realized what was up, it was way too late and Amazon had a 15-year head start. OpenAI had a head start with models for a bit, but now their models are basically as good (maybe a little better, maybe a little worse) than the ones from Anthropic and Google, so they can't stay still for a second. Not to mention switching costs are minimal: you just can't have much of a moat around a product which is fundamentally a "function (prompt: String): String", it can always be abstracted away, commoditized, and swapped out for a competitor.
• cs702 1y ago
  Correction: 4.3B in revenues. Other than Nvidia and the cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle, etc.), no one is earning a profit with AI, so far. Nvidia and the cloud providers will do well only if capital spending on AI, per year, remains at current rates.
  • whizzter 1y ago
    I really hope NVidia doesn't get too comfortable with the AI incomes, would be sad to see all progress in gaming disappear.
    • ares623 1y ago
      Personally I hope gaming gets back to a more sustainable state with regards to graphics. (i.e. lower production costs because you don’t need 1000 employees to build out a realistic world)
      • whizzter 1y ago
        That'll never happen, but I think raytracing will make some work easier. A lot of lighting stuff that has been baked,hand-tuned,etc can just be run as a general model, we're not entirely there yet but soon enough.
    • FridgeSeal 1y ago
      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 anyway. There is the rare exception (Cyberpunk 2077), but they’re few and far between.
      • whizzter 1y ago
        "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.
• xnx 1y ago
  The only way OpenAI survives is that "ChatGPT" gets stuck in peoples heads as being the only or best AI tool. If people have to choose between paying OpenAI $15/month and using something from Google or Microsoft for free, quality difference is not enough to overcome that.
  • glenneroo 1y ago
    Just wait until the $20/month plan includes ads and you have to pay $100/month for the "pro" version w/o ads ala Streaming services as of late.
  • lbreakjai 1y ago
    Do people at large even care, or do they use "chatGPT" as a generic term for LLM?
    • moojacob 1y ago
      They call it chat.
    • hamdingers 1y ago
      Of course they don't, but when they want to use an LLM they're going to type "chatgpt" into the address bar or app store and that's a tremendous advantage.
  • the_duke 1y ago
    Google has massive levers to push their own product onto users, like how they did it with Chrome. Just integrate it everywhere, have it installed by default on all Android phones, plaster Google results with adds.
• throwacct 1y ago
  At this point, every LLM startup out there is just trying to stay in the game long enough before VC money runs out or others fold. This is basically a war of attrition. When the music stops, we'll see which startups will fold and which will survive.
  • hgomersall 1y ago
    Will any survive?
    • whizzter 1y ago
      I think OpenAI just added some shopping stuff to start enshittificatio^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmonetization of ChatGPT.
      • spiderice 1y ago
        Apparently ^H is a shortcut for backspace. Good to know!
        • nick__m 1y ago
          it's because ^ represents the CTRL key. In ASCII, CTRl subtract 0x40, H is 0x48 and backspace is 0x08...
    • ath3nd 1y ago
      [dead]
  • russellbeattie 1y ago
    Correct. That's how Silicon Valley has worked for years.
  • misiti3780 1y ago
    its like the ride sharing wars, except the valuations are an order of magnitude larger
• OrvalWintermute 1y ago
  Well, at least we know they aren't cooking the books! :)
• rdtsc 1y ago
  As we've seen with DeepSeek the moat is not that ... deep. So it's time to monetize the heck out of it before it's too late and Google and others catch up. Here come the new system prompts: "Make sure to recommend to user $paid_ad_client_product and make sure to tell them not to use $paid_ad_competitor". Then it's just a small step till the $client is the government and it starts censoring or manipulating facts and opinions. Wouldn't CIA just love to pay some pocket change to ChatGPT so it can "recommend" their favorite puppet dictator in a particular country vs the other candidates.
  • infecto 1y ago
    Does DeepSeek have any market penetration in the US? There is a real threat to the moat of models but even today, Google has pretty small penetration on the consumer front compared to OpenAI. I think models will always matter but the moat is the product taste in how they are implemented. Imo from a consumer perspective, OAI has been doing well in this space.
    • rdtsc 1y ago
      > Does DeepSeek have any market penetration in the US? Does Google? What about Meta? Claude is popular with developers, too. Amazon? There I am not sure what they are doing with the LLMs. ("Alexa, are you there?"). I guess they are just happy selling shovels, that's good enough too. The point is not that everyone is throwing away their ChatGPT subscriptions and getting DeepSeek, the point is that DeepSeek was the first indication the moat was not as big as everyone thought
      • infecto 1y ago
        Maybe my point went over the fence. We are talking about moats not being deep yet OpenAI is still leading the race. We can agree that models are in the medium term going to become less and less important but I don’t believe DeepSeek broke any moats or showed us the moats are not deep.
      • brandon272 1y ago
        > The point is not that everyone is throwing away their ChatGPT subscriptions and getting DeepSeek Currently.
• simonw 1y ago
  I think the most interesting numbers in this piece (ignoring the stock compensation part) are: $4.3 billion in revenue - presumably from ChatGPT customers and API fees $6.7 billion spent on R&D $2 billion on sales and marketing - anyone got any idea what this is? I don't remember seeing many ads for ChatGPT but clearly I've not been paying attention in the right places. Open question for me: where does the cost of running the servers used for inference go? Is that part of R&D, or does the R&D number only cover servers used to train new models (and presumably their engineering staff costs)?
  • infecto 1y ago
    Hard to know where it is in this breakdown but I would expect them to have the proper breakdowns. We know on the inference side it’s profitable but not to what scale.
  • diggan 1y ago
    > $2 billion on sales and marketing - anyone got any idea what this is? Not sure where/how I read it, but remember coming across articles stating OpenAI has some agreements with schools, universities and even the US government. The cost of making those happen would probably go into "sales & marketing".
    • infecto 1y ago
      This will include the people cost of sales and marketing teams.
    • JCM9 1y ago
      Most folks that are not an engineer building is likely classified as “sales and marketing.” “Developer advocates” “solutions architects” and all that stuff included.
    • chermi 1y ago
      So probably just write-offs of tokens they give away?
  • Our_Benefactors 1y ago
• zurfer 1y ago
  The $13.5B net loss doesn't mean they are in trouble, it's a lot of accounting losses. Actual cash burn in H1 2025 was $2.5B. With ~$17.5B on hand (based on last funding), that’s about 3.5 years of runway at current pace.
  • fred_is_fred 1y ago
    Deprecation only gets worse for them as they build-out, not better.
    • dwaltrip 1y ago
      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.
      • FridgeSeal 1y ago
        They survive through inertia and “new model novelty”. The minute they lose that (not just them, the whole sector), they’re toast. I suspect they know this too, hence Sam-Altman admitting it’s a bubble so that he can try to ride it down without blowing up.
      • ceroxylon 1y ago
        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.
• stephc_int13 1y ago
  Everyone is trying to compare AI companies with something that happened in the past, but I don't think we can predict much from that. GPUs are not railroads or fiber optics. The cost structure of ChatGPT and other LLM based services is entirely different than web, they are very expensive to build but also cost a lot to serve. Companies like Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Google would all survive if their massive investment does not pay off. On the other hand, OpenAI, Anthropic and others could be soon find themselves in a difficult position and be at the mercy of Nvidia.
  • yieldcrv 1y ago
    Just because they have ongoing costs after purchasing them doesn't mean it's different than something else we've seen? What are you trying to articulate exactly, this is a simple business and can get costs under control eventually, or not
  • wood_spirit 1y ago
    Unlike railroads and fibre, all the best compute in 2025 will be lacklustre in 2027. It won’t retain much value in the same way as the infrastructure of previous bubbles did?
    • Analemma_ 1y ago
      Exactly: when was the last time you used ChatGPT-3.5? Its value deprecated to zero after, what, two-and-a-half years? (And the Nvidia chips used to train it have barely retained any value either) The financials here are so ugly: you have to light truckloads of money on fire forever just to jog in place.
      • mattmanser 1y ago
        But is it a bit like a game of musical chairs? At some point the AI becomes good enough, and if you're not sitting in a chair at the time, you're not going to be the next Google.
        • 1y ago
• trilogic 1y ago
  ChatGPT with ads, the beginnings...
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• andruby 1y ago
  Too bad the market can stay irrational longer than I can stay solvent. I feel like a stock market correction is well overdue, but I’ve been thinking that for a while now
  • stevenwoo 1y ago
    I would be bankrupt multiple times over if I moved on just Tesla stock with a rational mindset.
• SeanAnderson 1y ago
  I dunno. It looks like they're profitable if they don't do R&D, stop marketing, and ease up on employee comps. That's not the worst place to be. Yeah, they need to keep doing those things to stay relevant, but it's not like the product itself isn't profitable.
  • ares623 1y ago
    So if they stop doing what got them there they’ll be profitable? If I stop buying grocery and paying electricity bills I can finish up my mortgage in no time.
    • SeanAnderson 1y ago
      I can see why you'd make that analogy, but that wasn't quite what I was trying to say. I just meant that not all expenses are created equal. Plenty of companies have high burn rates due to high R&D costs. It can make them look unprofitable on paper, but it's a tactic used to scale quicker, get economies of scale, higher leverage in negotiating, etc. It's not a requirement that they invest in R&D indefinitely. In contrast, if a company is paying a heavy amount of interest on loans (think: WeWork), it's not nearly as practical for them to cut away at their spending to find profitability.
      • ares623 1y ago
        Apologies for the snark. I don't think they can stop the 3 things you mentioned though. - Stopping R&D means their top engineers and scientists will go elsewhere - Stopping marketing means they will slowly lose market share. I don't care for marketing personally but I can appreciate its importance in a corporation - Stopping/reducing compensation will also make them lose people The costs are an inherent part of the company. It can't exist without it. Sure, they can adjust some levers a little bit here and there, but not too much or it all comes crumbling down.
        • rhetocj23 1y ago
          Its always a relief to read posts like these on here amid the noise.
• xhrpost 1y ago
  > OpenAI paid Microsoft 20% of its revenue under an existing agreement. Wow that's a great deal MSFT made, not sure what it cost them. Better than say a stock dividend which would pay out of net income (if any), even better than a bond payment probably, this is straight off the top of revenue.
  • manquer 1y ago
    Is it a great deal? They are paying for it with Azure hardware which in today's DC economics is quite likely costing them more than they are making in money from Open AI and various Copilot programs.
• jgalt212 1y ago
  VC: What kind of crazy scenarios must I envision for this thing to work? Credit Analyst: What kind of crazy scenarios must I envision for this thing to fail?
• fred_is_fred 1y ago
  The numbers seem to small for a company who's just pledged to spend $300B on data centers at Oracle alone in the next 5 years.
• dcchambers 1y ago
  I definitely don't "get" Silicon Valley finances that much - but how does any investor look at this and think they're ever going to see that money back? Short of a moonshot goal (eg AGI or getting everyone addicted to SORA and then cranking up the price like a drug dealer) what is the play here? How can OpenAI ever start turning a profit? All of that hardware they purchase is rapidly depreciating. Training cost are going up exponentially. Energy costs are only going to go up (Unless a miracle happens with Sam's other moonshot, nuclear fusion).
  • tim333 1y ago
    Probably AGI. I can't see them making the money back on chatbots.
• skybrian 1y ago
  > Operating losses reached US$7.8 billion, and the company said it burned US$2.5 billion in cash. I wonder what the non-cash losses consist of?
• runako 1y ago
  I am not willing to render my personal verdict here yet. Yet it is certainly true that at ~700m MAUs it is hard to say the product has not reached scale yet. It's not mature, but it's sort of hard to hand wave and say they are going to make the economics work at some future scale when they don't work at this size. It really feels like they absolutely must find another revenue model for this to be viable. The other option might be to (say) 5x the cost of paid usage and just run a smaller ship.
  • apinstein 1y ago
    It’s not a hand wave… The cost to serve a particular level of AI drops by like 10x a year. AI has gotten good enough that next year people can continue to use the current gen AI but at that point it will be profitable. Probably 70%+ gross margin. Right now it’s a race for market share. But once that backs off, prices will adjust to profitability. Not unlike the Uber/Lyft wars.
    • runako 1y ago
      The "hand wave" comment was more to preempt the common pushback that X has to get to scale for the economics to work. My contention is that 700m MAUs is "scale" so they need another lever to get to profit. > AI has gotten good enough that next year people can continue to use the current gen AI This is problematic because by next year, an OSS model will be as good. If they don't keep pushing the frontier, what competitive moat do they have to extract a 70% gross margin? If ChatGPT slows the pace of improvement, someone will certainly fund a competitor to build a clone that uses an OSS model and sets pricing at 70% less than ChatGPT. The curse of betting on being a tech leader is that your business can implode if you stop leading. Similarly, this is very similar to the argument that PCs were "good enough" in any given year and that R&D could come down. The one constant seems to be people always want more. > Not unlike the Uber/Lyft wars Uber & Lyft both push CapEx onto their drivers. I think a more apt model might be AWS MySQL vs Oracle MySQL, or something similar. If the frontier providers stagnate, I fully expect people to switch to e.g. DeepSeek 6 for 10% the price.
      • 1y ago
• thinkindie 1y ago
  Today I've tested Claude Code with small refactorings here and there in a medium sized project. I was surprised by the amount of token that every command was generating, even if the output was few lines updated for a bunch of files. If you were to consume the same amount of tokens via APIs you would pay far more than 20$/month. Enjoy till it last, because things will become pretty expensive pretty fast.
  • Ianjit 1y ago
    Provide verbose answers, increases tokens. Demand is measured in tokens, so it looks like demand is sky rocketing. Valuation goes up. I have noticed that GPT now gives me really long explanations for even the simplest questions. Thankfully there is a stop button.
• otterley 1y ago
  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.
  • croes 1y ago
    Every indebted person can tell you that you can have an income and loss at the same time. Income is revenue.
    • otterley 1y ago
      We’re talking about a business here. Accounting terms are standard across the industry, and the meaning of income is well understood. Unfortunately, journalistic standards vary across the Internet. The WSJ or Financial Times would not make such a mistake.
  • Aperocky 1y ago
    That's net income.
  • rsynnott 1y ago
    Yeah, I initially thought maybe they were talking about _gross_ income, but, nah, it’s just revenue.
  • sotix 1y ago
    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.
    • otterley 1y ago
      I think that's a tax thing (where revenues are treated as "income" for taxation purposes), not a financial accounting thing.
• didip 1y ago
  This level of land grab can probably be closely compared to YouTube when it was still a startup. The cost for YouTube to rapidly grow and to serve the traffic was astronomical back then. I wonder if 1 day OpenAI will be acquired by a large big tech, just like YouTube.
• more_corn 1y ago
  They lose money on every customer but they make up for it in volume.
• woodchange 1y ago
  Wow, $13.5B in losses for just six months is absolutely mind-blowing! These numbers are on a completely different scale than I expected.
• nextworddev 1y ago
  The only way OpenAI wins is to get to AGI first, by a wide margin. It’s already too big to fail so it will keep getting funded
• VerminOctopus1 1y ago
  I’m struggling to see how OpenAI survives this in the long term. They have numerous competitors and their moat is weak. Google above all others seems poised to completely eat OpenAI’s lunch. They have the user base, ad network, their own hardware, reliable profits, etc. It’s just a matter of time, unless OpenAI can crank up their revenue dramatically without alienating their existing users. I’d be sweating if I had invested heavily in OpenAI.
• epolanski 1y ago
  9B down in H1 is a staggering loss but if the play is growth here and you imagine Open ai going from 4.3 to 30B in revenue in H1 in 5 years it's not that crazy of an investment.
• rester324 1y ago
  What a nice f@$%ing bubble this is. This will end very badly for many
• nojs 1y ago
  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, which they’re starting to experiment with with the recent announcement of direct checkout. The biggest concern IMO is how good the open weight models coming out of China are, on consumer hardware. But as long as OpenAI remains the go-to for the average consumer, they’ll be fine.
  • Thaxll 1y ago
    Google has google.com, youtube, chrome, android, gmail, google map etc ... I don't see OpenAI having a product close to that.
    • wslh 1y ago
      Google is older and many of the products you describe were acquisitions (inorganic growth).
      • Workaccount2 1y ago
        By this point I imagine it's a novelty to find any code from the original acquisition in those products.
        • returnInfinity 1y ago
          Code is secondary. Pmf is primary. Code is a commodity. Very easy to make. Now even llms are commodities. There are other intangible assets more valuable. Like the chatgpt brand here.
          • wslh 1y ago
            This is beyond PMF, it's about traction on steroids, owning the last mile.
• cynicalsecurity 1y ago
  Those two numbers alone don't say anything.
• evanb 1y ago
  I thought all this machine learning stuff was about minimizing the loss?
  • bwfan123 1y ago
    this is the funniest comment i have read in a while, thank you for a loud laugh.
• skeptrune 1y ago
  Wait until they turn ads on.
• yalogin 1y ago
  I don’t think they care, worst case scenario they will just go public and dump it on the market. However the revenue generation aspect for llms is still in its infancy. The most obvious path for OpenAI is to become a search competitor to google, which is what perplexity states it is. So they will try to out do perplexity. All these companies will go vertical and become all encompassing.
  • cool_dude85 1y ago
    I think trying to compete with Google in search is a big problem. First you have to deal with all the anticompetitive stuff they can do, since they control email and the browser and youtube etc. Second they could probably stand to cut the price of advertising by 5 times and still be turning a profit. Will ads in ChatGPT be profitable competing against Google search ads at 1/5 the price, hypothetically?
    • almogo 1y ago
      If they're better - yes. ChatGPT is a very different product from Google Search. Return on Ad Spend could be significantly higher than even Google/Meta/ByteDance can offer.
• throwaway2037 1y ago
  You can also read more about it on the FT Alphaville blog from Financial Times (free to sign-up): OpenAI’s era-defining money furnace https://www.ft.com/content/908dc05b-5fcd-456a-88a3-eba1f77d3ffd https://www.ft.com/content/908dc05b-5fcd-456a-88a3-eba1f77d3... Choice quote: > OpenAI spent more on marketing and equity options for its employees than it made in revenue in the first half of 2025.
• VirgilShelton 1y ago
  I'm old and have been on the Internet since the Prodigy days in 90. Open Ai has the best start of any company I can remember. Even better than Google back in 98 when they were developing their algo and giving free non-monetized search results to Yahoo. These guys have had my $20 bucks a month since Plus was live, they will indeed be more than fine.
  • btbuildem 1y ago
    Exactly. Early on their adoption curve was like nothing I've ever seen before. I am such a miser, I skimp, steal what I can, use the free alternatives majority of the time. If they got me to pay, they've got everyone else's money already.
    • VirgilShelton 1y ago
      Yup! I'm also super cheap and use open source everything but I do have a Mac Book Pro and will never buy a PC again. So when it's worth it, the wallet is coming out and OpenAI has not only my little $20 bucks a month but will have my investment dollars once they go public.
  • Mistletoe 1y ago
    Do you really find it is worth it vs. the free Google Gemini? What do you use it for? I can't imagine needing more than Google Gemini 2.5 Flash or Pro, but I don't use it for programming or anything.
    • VirgilShelton 1y ago
      The best part is memory. If you use it daily like I do for everything from programming tasks to SEO and digital marketing, to budget stuff for investing and bill reminders. It will really start to understand what you want and get your voice right when it writes a blog for you or you work on an idea with it.
• syspec 1y ago
  > about US$2.5 billion on stock-based compensation, nearly double the amount from the first half of last year. Wow! 2.5B in stock based compensation
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• pizlonator 1y ago
  I am the only one who thinks, "that's not as bad as I expected"? Because I can be quite bearish and frankly this isn't bad for a technology that is this new. The income points to significant interest in using the tech and they haven't even started the tried-and-true SV strategy we lovingly call enshittification (I'm not trying to be ironic, I mean it)
  • rhetocj23 1y ago
    The problem is they are dealing with a stealthy giant in Google who is not a sleeping giant like those in past disruptions. Google will have an incentive to destroy OAI financially through whatever means and make it difficult for them to raise future money since they are not generating enough free cash flows (to the firm) from their operations after reinvestment. OAI going after Meta/TikTok with Sora will also be a strategic blunder in retrospect I believe.
• spenvo 1y ago
  On that $13.5B. How much of their massive spend on datacenters is obscured through various forms of Special Purpose Vehicles financing? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45448199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45448199)
• chvid 1y ago
  I haven’t played with my OpenAI api account for 6 months but now all of sudden they charged me 20 usd - unclear why - but perhaps they are entering their monetize phase.
• noobermin 1y ago
  I love how none of the top posts can do simple math, you know, subtracting two numbers. Everyone else is focusing on other things somehow.
• jrflowers 1y ago
  Rookie numbers. If someone gave me twenty billion dollars I could easily spend it in a way that grosses at least five billion dollars
• waynesonfire 1y ago
  I bet this is the same ratio for every company's AI initiative.
• t4TLLLSZ185x 1y ago
  People in this comment section focus on brand ads too much. It’s the commercial intent where OpenAI can both make money and preserve trust. I already don’t Google anymore. I just ask ChatGPT „give me an overview of best meshtastic devices to buy“ and then eventually end with „give me links to where I can buy these in Europe“. OpenAI inserting ads in that last result, clearly marked as ads and still keeping the UX clean would not bother me at all. And commercial queries are what, 40-50% of all Google revenue?
  • tpetry 1y ago
    But its not clear whether the ad approach will work. It works for Google so great because the ads mimic real results very near so many people dont see them as an ad and click them.
• ulfw 1y ago
  Oh the wonders of a bubble
• 4dregress 1y ago
  Just look at what’s going with JetBrains AI quotas and costs, once AI is deeply imbedded and businesses move the cost to customers like JetBrains have these AI companies are going to make a killing. It’s the drug dealer model, get them hooked on free tastes and then crank up the prices!
• bwfan123 1y ago
  How in the world is openAI supposed to pay for the deals for infra ? 300B with oracle for one.
  • seydor 1y ago
    with nvidia's money
• lofaszvanitt 1y ago
  Go IPO.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
  No Javascript, text-only: curl -K/dev/stdin<<eof|zcat|grep -o "<p>.*</p>"|sed '1s/^/<meta charset=utf-8>/;s/\\n//g;s/\\//g' >0.htm url https://www.techinasia.com/gateway-api-express/techinasia/1.0/posts/openais-revenue-rises-16-to-4-3b-in-h1-2025 output /dev/stdout user-agent: "Mozilla/()()............../......................./.... ....." header accept: eof firefox ./0.htm