[felixfurtak]

OpenAI is basically just Netscape at this point. An innovative product with no means of significant revenue generation.

One one side it's up against large competitors with an already established user base and product line that can simply bundle their AI offerings into those products. Google will do just what Microsoft did with Internet Explorer and bundle Gemini in for 'Free' with their already other profitable products and established ad-funded revenue streams.

At the same time, Deepseek/Qwen, etc. are open sourcing stuff to undercut them on the other side. It's a classic squeeze on their already fairly dubious business model.

[edouard-harris]

> with no means of significant revenue generation.

OpenAI will top $20 billion in ARR this year, which certainly seems like significant revenue generation. [1]

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/sam-altman-says-openai-will-...

[stack_framer]

I can generate $20 billion in ARR this year too! I just need you to give me $100 billion and allow me to sell each of your dollars for 0.2 dollars.

[bgirard]

It's a fun trope to repeat but that's not what OpenAI is doing. I get a ton of value from ChatGPT and Codex from my subscription. As long as the inference is not done at a lost this analogy doesn't hold. They're not paying me to use it. They are generating output that is very valuable to me. Much more than my subscription cost.

I've been able to help setup cross app automation for my partner's business, remodel my house, plan a trip of Japan and assist with the cultural barrier, vibe code apps, technical support and so much more.

[bloppe]

To be fair, I would get a ton of value out of someone selling dollars for 20 cents apiece.

But ya, OAI is clearly making a ton of revenue. That doesn't mean it's a good business, though. Giving them a 20 year horizon, shareholders will be very upset unless the firm can deliver about a trillion in profit, not revenue, to justify the 100B (so far) in investment, and that would barely beat the long term s&p 500 average return.

But Altman himself has said he'll need much more investment in the coming years. And even if OAI became profitable by jacking up prices and flooding gpt with ads, the underlying technology is so commodified, they'd never be able to achieve a high margin, assuming they can turn a profit at all.

[littlestymaar]

I'd be a little bit more nuanced:

I think there's something off with their plans right now: it's pretty clear at this point that they can't own the technological frontier, Google is just too close already and from a purely technological PoV they are much better suited to have the best tech in the medium term. (There's no moat and Google has way more data and compute available, and also tons of cash to burn without depending on external funding).

But ChatGPT is an insane brand and for most (free) customers I don't think model capabilities (aka “intelligence”) are that important. So if they stopped training frontier models right now and focus on driving their costs low by optimizing their inference compute budget while serving ads, they can make a lot of money from their user base.

But that would probably mean losing most of its paying customers over the long run (companies won't be buying mediocre token at a premium for long) and more importantly it would require abandoning the AGI bullshit narrative, which I'm not sure Altman is willing to do. (And even if he was, how to do that without collapsing from lack of liquidity due to investors feeling betrayed is an open question).

[array_key_first]

Being an insane brand means literally nothing if people can trivially switch to competitors, which they can.

There isn't even a tenth of enough money if you group together all of advertising. Like, the entire industry. Ads is a bad, bad plan that wont work. Advertising is also extremely overvalued. And even at it's overvalued price tag, it's nowhere near enough.

[bloppe]

The best way to drive inference cost down right now is to use TPUs. Either that or invest tons of additional money and manpower into silicon design like Google did, but they already have a 10 year lead there.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Altman's main interest is Altman. ChatGPT will be acquihired, most people will be let go, the brand will become a shadow of its former self, and Altman will emerge with a major payday and no obvious dent in his self-made reputation as a leading AGIthinkfluenceretc.

I don't think ads are that easy, because the hard part of ads isn't taking money and serving up ad slop, it's providing convincing tracking and analytics.

As soon as ad slop appears a lot of customers will run - not all, but enough to make monetisation problematic.

[po]

as long as the business model is:

- users want the best/smartest LLM

- the best performance for inference is found by spending more and more tokens (deep thinking)

- pricing is based on cost per token

Then the inference providers/hyperscalers will take all of the margin available to app makers (and then give it to Nvidia apparently). It is a bad business to be in, and not viable for OpenAI at their valuation.

[riffraff]

> But ChatGPT is an insane brand

I mean, so was netscape.

[safety1st]

The whole US economy is so deep into La-La Land at this point that they don't really need to be a good business. There are already murmurings that they may pull off a trillion dollar IPO, I don't see why they wouldn't, Amazon was making it cool to lose money hand over fist during your IPO as far back as 1997. They have the President willing to pump up their joint ventures with executive orders, we may just see tech become more like the financial industry, where a handful of companies are dubbed "too big to fail" based on political connections, and get bailed out at the taxpayer's expense when things get too rough. None of these guys function according to the real rules of the economy or even the legal system at this point, they just make stuff up as they go along and if they're big enough or know someone big enough they often get away with it.

[usef-]

People did say the same thing about Youtube, which was unprofitable and extremely expensive to run in the early years. I remember thinking everyone would leave once ads were added.

At youtube's ad income rate (~$13/year), the current (but growing) ~800 million chatgpt users would add ~$10 billion. At facebook's rate (~$40-50/year) $32-40 billion. Potentially, an assistant would be more integrated into your life than either of those two.

The "audience retention" is the key question, not the profitability if they maintain their current audience. I've been surprised how many non-technical people I know don't want to try other models. "ChatGPT knows me".

[bloppe]

The network effects aren't the same. All the viewers watch youtube because it has all the content, and all the creators post on youtube because it has all the viewers.

How can a model achieve this kind of stickiness? By "knowing you"? I don't think that's the same at all. Personally, one of the reasons I prefer Claude is that it doesn't pretend to know me. I can control the context better.

[adgjlsfhk1]

the problem with the YouTube analogy is that media platforms have significant network affects that NN providers don't. OpenAI can't command a premium because every year that goes by the cost to train an equivalent model to theirs decreases.

[gbalduzzi]

Youtube didn't have a significant competitor, once the quality started declining and the ads started creeping up, there were no alternatives to switch to (as a user) because the content creators were in on the profit.

The same isn't true about ChatGPT.

Anthropic and Google provides a similar product, and switching to a better/cheaper platform is fairly easy as it only depends on you and not on others (content creators or friends) doing the same.

[hansmayer]

Minor difference : YT does not cost literally a human trip to Mars and back to operate

[usef-]

I suspect some of the downvoters hate the idea of ads, which is understandable.

But a lot of HN users use gmail, which has the same model. And there are plenty of paid email providers which seem far less popular (I use one). Ads didn't end up being a problem for most people provided they were kept independent of the content itself.

[felixfurtak]

All of which you will be able to do with your bundled assistant in the not-to-distant future.

OpenAI is a basket case:

- Too expensive and inconvenient to compete with commoditized, bundled assistants (from Google/ Microsoft/Apple)

- Too closed to compete with cheap, customizable open-source models

- Too dependent on partners

- Too late to establish its own platform lock-in

It echoes what happened to:

- Netscape (squeezed by Microsoft bundling + open protocols)

- BlackBerry (squeezed by Apple ecosystem + open Android OS)

- Dropbox (squeezed by iCloud, Google Drive, OneDrive + open tools like rclone)

When you live between giants and open-source, your margin collapses from both sides.

[deathhand]

So why does Salesforce still prosper? They are just a fancy database.

[felixfurtak]

Good question. Salesforce does well because they provide the application layer to the data.

The WWW in the 1990s was an explosion of data. To the casual observer, the web-browser appeared to be the internet. But it wasn't and in itself could never make money (See Netscape). The internet was the data.

The people who build the infrastructure for the WWW (Worldcom, Nortel, Cisco, etc.) found the whole enterprise to be an extremely loss-making activity. Many of them failed.

Google succeeded because it provided an application layer of search that helped people to navigate the WWW and ultimately helped people make sense of it. It helped people to connect with businesses. Selling subtle advertising along the way is what made them successful.

Facebook did the same with social media. It allowed people to connect with other people and monetized that.

Over time, as they became more dominant, the advertising got less subtle and then the income really started to flow.

Salesforce is similar in that it helps businesses connect with and do business with each other. They just use a subscription model, rather than advertising. This works because the businesses that use it can see a direct link to it and their profitability.

[array_key_first]

Because they lock you in. ChatGPT has no lock in, in fact none of the LLMs do just because of how they work.

Salesforce doesn't make a good product, and certainly not the best product. It doesn't matter, you don't need to if you can convince idiots with money to invest in you. And then the switching cost is too much, too late.

That business model is a dying one and all the software companies know it. That's why Microsoft has spent the last 15 years opening up their ecosystems. As automation increases, switching cost decreases. You cant rely on it.

[jasondigitized]

Because they locked-in a ton of enterprise customers and have an army of certified consultants who build custom solutions for you.

[esafak]

If it was 'just' a database it would never have got off the ground. It is obviously not a database; there is an application around it.

[tartoran]

There's no doubt you're getting a lot of value from OpenAI, I am too. And yes the subscription is a lot more value than what you pay for. That's because they're burning investor's money and it's not something that is sustainable. Once the money runs out they'll have to jack up prices and that's the moment of truth, we'll see what users are willing to pay for what. Google or another company may be able to provide all that much cheaper.

[HDThoreaun]

Inference is profitable for openai as far as I can tell. They dont need to jack up prices much, what they really need is users who are paying/consuming ads. Theyre burning money on free tier users and data center expansion so they can serve more users.

[NBJack]

This assumes your model is static and never needs to be improved or updated.

Inference is cheap because the final model, despite its size, is ridiculously less resource intensive to use than it is to produce.

ChatGPT in its latest form isn't bad by any means, but it is falling behind. And that requires significant overhead, both to train and to iterate on model architecture. It is often a variable cost as well.

[rglullis]

> They're not paying me to use it.

Of course they are.

> As long as the inference is not done at a loss.

If making money on inference alone was possible, there would be a dozen different smaller providers who'd be taking the open weights models and offering that as service. But it seems that every provider is anchored at $20/month, so you can bet that none of them can go any lower.

[FeepingCreature]

> If making money on inference alone was possible, there would be a dozen different smaller providers who'd be taking the open weights models and offering that as service.

There are! Look through the provider list for some open model on https://openrouter.ai . For instance, DeepSeek 3.1 has a dozen providers. It would not make any sense to offer those below cost because you have neither moat nor branding.

[dragonwriter]

> If making money on inference alone was possible

Maybe, but arguably a major reason you can't make money on inference right now is that the useful life of models is too short, so you can't amortize the development costs across much time because there is so much investment in the field that everyone is developing new models (shortening useful life in a competitive market) and everyone is simultaneously driving up the costs of inputs needed for developing models (increasing the costs that have to be amortized over the short useful life). Perversely, the AI bubble popping and resolving those issues may make profitability much easier for the survivors that have strong revenue streams.

[threeducks]

You need a certain level of batch parallelism to make inference efficient, but you also need enough capacity to handle request floods. Being a small provider is not easy.

[HDThoreaun]

The open models suck. AWS hosts them for less than closed models cost but no ones uses them, because they suck.

[rglullis]

It's not the open models that suck, it's the infrastructure around them. None of current "open weights providers" have:

   - good tools for agentic workflows
   - no tools for context management
   - infrastructure for input token caching

These are solvable without having to pay anything to OpenAI/Anthropic/Google.

[rprend]

They do make money on inference.

[munk-a]

As a developer - ChatGPT doesn't hold a candle compared to claude for coding related tasks and under performs for arbitrary format document parsing[1]. It still has value and can handle a lot of tasks that would amaze someone in 2020 - but it is simply falling behind and spending much more doing so.

1. It actually under performs Claude, Gemini and even some of the Grok models for accuracy with our use case of parsing PDFs and other rather arbitrarily formatted files.

[cush]

> I get a ton of value from ChatGPT and Codex from my subscription

I think that’s what they’re saying. OpenAI is selling you a $1 product for $0.2

Tokens are too cheap right now and nobody is working on a path to dial up the cost

[esafak]

Predictions are supposedly profitable but not enough to amortize everything else. I don't see how they would justify their investments even if predictions cost them nothing.

[mirthflat83]

Well, don't you think you're getting a ton of value because they're selling each of their dollars for 0.2 dollars?

[jfb]

That the product is useful does not mean the supplier of the product has a good business; and of course, vice versa. OpenAI has a terrible business at the moment, and the question is, do they have a plausible path to a good one?

[ReptileMan]

>. As long as the inference is not done at a lost this analogy doesn't hold.

I think that there were some article here that claimed that even inference is done at loss - and talking about per subscriber. I think it was for their 200$ subscription.

In a way we will be in a deal with it situation soon where they will just impose metered models and not subscription.

[hansmayer]

> It's a fun trope to repeat but that's not what OpenAI is doing.

This is literally what OpenAI is doing. They are bleeding cash, i.e. spending more than they earn. How useful it is to you is not relevant in the context of the sustainability. You know what is also super useful to some people? Private yachts and jets. It does not mean they are good for the society as a whole. But even leaving out the hollistic view for a moment - their business model is not sustainable unless they manage to convince the politics to declare them national infrastructure or something like that, and have taxpayers continue to finance them, which is what they already probed for in the last months. Out of interest, why would you want ChatGPT plan your trip to Japan? Isn't planning it yourself a part of the excitement?

[steveBK123]

If the subscription cost 5x as much would you still pay and feel you are getting such a great value?

[dosinga]

If there are no free alternatives, yes. 100 USD a month for ChatGPT seems great value

[atonse]

I pay $100/month for Claude Max, and I've already said it, I would go up to $500 a month and wouldn't hesitate for a second. I'd probably start to hesitate for $1,000 maybe, only cuz I know I wouldn't be able to use it enough to maximize that value. But I might still suck it up and pay for it (I don't use it enough yet to need the $200/month but if I started hitting limits faster, I would upgrade), or at that point start looking for alternatives.

It's worth that much to me in the time saved. But I'm a business owner, so I think the calculus might be quite different (since I can find ways to recoup those costs) from an individual, who pays out of their main income.

I outlined examples of how I used CC/AI a couple months ago [1]. Since then I've used it even more, to help reduce our cloud bills.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45382337

[steveBK123]

Right I am sure some find it is worth 5-10x the cost.

The challenge is that if the numbers are accurate they need 5-10x to break even on inference compute costs, before getting into training costs and all the other actual overhead of running a company like compensation.

Will everyone be willing to pay 5-10x? Probably no.

Will half of users pay 10-20x? Or a quarter pay 20x++?

Or we end up with ads … which already seem to be in motion

[mrweasel]

95% of ChatGPT users aren't paying customers, if they won't pay $10 per month, there's zero chance of them paying $100 or $500.

That's not to say that there aren't many, like you, for whom $500 is a perfectly good deal, there's just not nearly enough for OpenAI to ever turn a profit.

[viking123]

I mean Claude is good for business use-cases, other than that it's completely censored cuck garbage and the CEO is worse than the pope. With Grok you can actually roleplay without it wagging its finger at you. OH MY GOSH YOU SAID BOOB!

Normies literally see no difference between GPT and Claude, just that Claude is much more expensive and CEO is even more of a dummie than Altman.

[bambax]

The parent isn't arguing you're not getting a good value out of the product. It says that users' contributions don't cover production costs, which may or may not be true but doesn't have much to do with how much value they get from it.

[mrwrong]

> I've been able to help setup cross app automation for my partner's business, remodel my house, plan a trip of Japan and assist with the cultural barrier, vibe code apps, technical support and so much more.

you could have done all of this without a chatbot.

[aprilthird2021]

Yeah. Imagine if anyone listed all the stuff Google helped them do. It would seem pretty similar. Maybe only vibe code an app is not in there

[PantaloonFlames]

You are mostly missing the point. You’re saying you get value out of what OpenAI is offering you. Thats not at issue here.

The question is, does OpenAI get value out of the exchange?

You touched on it ever so briefly: “as long as inference is not done at a loss”. That is it, isn’t it? Or more generally, As long as OpenAI is making money . But they are not.

There’s the rub.

It’s not only about whether you think giving them your money is a good exchange. It needs to be a good exchange for both sides, for the business to be viable.

[protimewaster]

But why will this continue to be true in the future if OpenAI models aren't as good as alternative models?

[csomar]

That's not the parent point though? His point is that if the models are not largely available, and then are better competitors; then what's the point of ChatGPT? Maybe you decide to stick with ChatGPT for whatever reason, but people will move to cheaper and better alternatives.

[umanwizard]

This analogy only really works for companies whose gross margin is negative, which as far as I know isn’t the case for OpenAI (though I could be wrong).

It’s an especially good analogy if there is no plausible path to positive gross margin (e.g. the old MoviePass) which I think is even less likely to be true for OpenAI.

[techblueberry]

Why is it that I feel like your confidence in OpenAI's path to profitability exceeds Sam Altman's?

[umanwizard]

I'm not confident at all. I didn't say "there is definitely a path". I said the existence of such a path is plausible. I'm sure Sam Altman believes that too, or he'd have changed jobs ages ago.

[s3p]

Exactly, so you can't generate a cent of revenue. OpenAI got millions of people to buy a $20/mo subscription. You couldn't.

[eli_gottlieb]

We should perhaps say profit when we are talking about revenue - cost and revenue when we only mean the first term in the subtraction.

[bibimsz]

!

[postflopclarity]

very clever! I hadn't seen anybody make this point before in any of these threads /s

obviously the nature of OpenAIs revenue is very different than selling $1 for $0.2 because their customers are buying an actual service, not anything with resale value or obviously fungible for $

[runako]

FWIW the selling $1 for $0.2 is widely applied to any business that is selling goods below cost.

For example: free shipping at Amazon does not have resale value and is not obviously fungible, but everyone understands they are eating a cost that otherwise would be borne by their customers. The suggestion is that OpenAI is doing similar, though it is harder to tease out because their books are opaque.

[djmips]

Can you explain why Amazon eats the cost of shipping? Are they like the "First CityWide Change Bank"? How do they make money? Answer: Volume.

[runako]

They don't eat all of it anymore, even for Prime members. To the extent they do, it's largely to reduce friction for what is still a purchase that will generally take longer to arrive than going to the store. Plus, it's a nice perk that makes you feel like you're getting a deal.

As for profits, I haven't looked recently, but IIRC profits are mostly:

1. AWS

2. Prime membership fees

The latter drives loyalty and therefore volume and predictability, which allows Amazon to e.g. operate their own mini-UPS in the quest to make money on most parcels. They also rolled back free shipping on everything over the years and use it more surgically and with minimum order sizes.

[array_key_first]

They're not selling a service, they're selling access to a service. You can access a more or less equivalent service from multiple companies.

The value of an LLM isn't an LLM. That's entirely 100% fungible. The value is exclusively what it produces.

If other people can produce the same thing, your LLM value approaches 0.

[rprend]

They sell a product, not a model. ChatGPT is a product, GPT5 is a technology.

If you hope that ChatGPT will be worthless because the underlying technology will commodify, then you are naive and will be disappointed.

If that logic made sense, why has it never happened before? Servers and computers have been commodified for decades! Salesforce is just a database, social media is just a relational database, Uber is just a GPS wrapper, AWS is just a server.

People pay money, setup subscriptions, and download apps to solve a problem, and once they solve that problem they rarely switch. ChatGPT is the fifth most visited website in the world! Facebook and Deepseek making opensource models means you can make your own ChatGPT, just like you can make your own Google, and nobody will use it, just like nobody uses the dozens of “better” search engines out there.

[array_key_first]

The underlying technology already is commodified - there are many, many other models that are extremely competitive.

The problem is: suppose Google has an equivalent model (they do, but if you disagree, just pretend). Suppose they do. What then is OpenAI offering that makes its product more intriguing? Nothing. They have a chat interface. An intern can make a chat interface.

> ChatGPT is the fifth most visited website in the world!

To me, this is absolutely worthless information. That DOES NOT mean that ChatGPT is in the clear and nobody else will overtake them.

Your analogies really paint the picture here aptly. Salesforce is not just a database, it's a lot of stuff on top of it. AWS is not just a server, it's a lot of stuff on top of it. Uber is not just a GPS wrapper, it's a taxi service. That's a different thing.

ChatGPT... is just a model. What they add on top approaches zero. Because that's just how the technology works. It takes text and gives it to a model and then spits out the output. What more can you add onto that system, removing the model? Make it easier to input text? Make it easier to get output? Well that's truly trivial to do, and I would argue ChatGPT isn't even in the top 10 when it comes to that. Today.

[m3kw9]

You sell dollar 1 penny, they sell it for more like 70. Different skill level

[signatoremo]

Can you? What are you selling? Who are you and why should I believe in you? What would I get in return?

[stavros]

He can. He's selling dollars. He's a person who sells dollars for fewer dollars. You'd get dollars.

[riku_iki]

> Altman says that OpenAI will top $20 billion in ARR this year, which certainly seems like significant revenue generation. [1]

fixed this for you

[raw_anon_1111]

And lose how much money doing it?

[literalAardvark]

They make up for it in volume

[unsupp0rted]

Can he safely lie about that? Or would that be a slam-dunk lawsuit against him? He's already got Elon Musk on his enemies list.

[317070]

People need to understand that OpenAI is not a publicly traded company. Sam is allowed to be outrageously optimistic about his best case scenarios, as long as he is correct with OpenAI's investors. But those investors are not "the public", so he can publicly state pretty much anything he wants, as long as it is not contradicting facts.

So he cannot say "OpenAI made 20B profit last year." but can say "OpenAI will make 20B revenue next year." Optimism is not a crime.

[riku_iki]

I am not a lawyer, but it is possible he can say whatever he wants without consequences to public because OAI is not a public company.

[cmiles8]

Kind of, but there are limits. The investors still have LPs who aren’t going to be happy if things get messy. Things can still get really ugly even for a private company.

[azemetre]

Most of the credit being throwing around isn't coming from traditional banking companies, mostly private credit being utilized.

Private credit isn't really unregulated.

If you're interested in learning more I believe Matt Stoller has written a few articles about the private credit markets.

[sethops1]

The LPs are eyeing that $1 trillion IPO to dump on retail. They don't care what Sam says until then.

[brazukadev]

No, they won't, fake numbers from his arse. The same way ChatGPT does not have 800million users.

[herbst]

Wait. Are you telling me chatgpt is not the fastest growing everything ever in the universe?

[echelon]

In 2024, OpenAI claimed the bulk of its revenue was 70-80% through consumer ChatGPT subscriptions. That's wildly impressive.

But now they've had an order of magnitude revenue growth. That can't still be consumer subscriptions, right? They've had to have saturated that?

I haven't seen reports of the revenue breakdown, but I imagine it must be enterprise sales.

If it's enterprise sales, I'd imagine that was sold to F500 companies in bulk during peak AI hype. Most of those integrations are probably of the "the CEO has tasked us with `implementing an AI strategy`" kind. If so, I can't imagine they will survive in the face of a recession or economic downturn. To be frank, most of those projects probably won't pan out even under the rosiest of economic pictures.

We just don't know how to apply AI to most enterprise automation tasks yet. We have a long way to go.

I'd be very curious to see what their revenue spread looks like today, because that will be indicative of future growth and the health of the company.

[cheschire]

With less than 10% of users paying for a subscription, I doubt they have saturated.

[debugnik]

I'm reading 5% on a quick search. Isn't that an unsurprising conversion rate for a successful app with a free tier? Why would it increase further in ChatGPT's case, other than by losing non-paying customers?

[HDThoreaun]

consumer subs arent even close to saturated and business subs are where the real money is anyway. Most white collar workers are still on free tier copilot, not paying openai.

[blitz_skull]

Revenue != Profit

OpenAI is hemorrhaging cash at an astronomical rate.

[searls]

It would be funny if OpenAI turns for-profit, faceplants, and then finds new life (as Mozilla did) as a non-profit sharing its tools for free.

[felixfurtak]

This is pretty much all that OpenAI is at the moment.

Mozilla is a non-profit that is only sustained by the generous wealthy benefactor (Google) to give the illusion that there is competition in the browser market.

OpenAI is a non-profit funded by a generous wealthy benefactor (Microsoft).

Ideas of IPO and profitability are all just pipe dreams in Altmans imagination.

[shridharxp]

Few months ago, the founder was talking about "AGI" and ridiculous universal basic compute. At this point, I don't even know whom to believe. My first hand experience tells ChatGPT and even ClaudeCode are no where near the expertise they are touted to be. Yet, the marketing by these companies is so immense that you get washed away, you don't know who are agents and who are putting their true opinions.

[fragmede]

> My first hand experience tells ChatGPT and even ClaudeCode are no where near the expertise they are touted to be

Not doubting you, but where specifically have the latest models fallen short for you?

[shridharxp]

ClaudeCode:

- Making functions async without need; it doesn't know the difference between the two or in which scenarios to use them.

- Consistently fails to make changes to the frontend if a project grows above 5000 LOC or a file goes near 1000 LOC.

- The worst part is it lies after making changes.

ChatGPT:

- Fails to implement mid-complex functionality such as scrolling to the bottom when new logs are coming in and not scrolling when the user is checking historical logs.

These models are good at mainstream tasks, the snippets of which you find a lot in repositories. Try to do something off-beat such as algorithmic trading; they fail spectacularly.

[rurp]

I'm unsure how someone could use LLMs regularly and not encounter significant mistakes. I use them a lot less than some devs and still run into basic errors pretty often, to the point that I rarely bother using them for niche or complicated problems even though they are pretty helpful in other cases. Just in the past few days I've had Claude trip all over itself on multiple basic tasks.

One case was asking how to do a straightforward thing with a popular open source JavaScript library, right in the sweet spot of what models should excel at. Claude's whole approach was completely broken because it relied on a hallucinated library parameter that didn't exist and didn't have an equivalent. It invented a keyword that doesn't appear in the entire open source library repo, to control functionality the library doesn't have.

[fragmede]

Care to share a chat link?

[elAhmo]

> Mozilla is a non-profit that is only sustained by the generous wealthy benefactor (Google) to give the illusion that there is competition in the browser market.

Good way of phrasing things. Kinda sad to read this, I tried to react with 'wait there is competition in the browser market', but it is not a great argument to make - without money for using Google as a default search engine, Mozilla would effectively collapse.

[chii]

> Mozilla would effectively collapse.

given how bloated it (the org) is, i think that may be a good thing. Return firefox to good old community contributions, and donations from users.

[blackenedgem]

The main issue there is you need someway to pay the engineers in that transitional period the moment Mozilla collapses. Otherwise they leave, find new jobs, and you lose all the expertise and knowledge of the codebase.

[djmips]

At least they wouldn't have to change their name!

[bibimsz]

anecdotal, but my wife wasn't interested in switching to claude from chatgpt. as far as she's concerned chatgpt knows her, and she's got her assistant perfectly tuned to her liking.

[munchler]

ChatGPT is to AI as Facebook is to social media. OpenAI captured a significant number of users due to first-mover advantage, but that advantage is long gone now.

[jimbokun]

1. ChatGPT would be MySpace as the first mover. 2. Facebook has insane lock in: your entire graph of friends and family.

[felixfurtak]

And Facebook only makes money because it is essentially just an advertising platform. Same with Google. It's fundametally just ads.

The only way OpenAI can survive is to replicate this model. But it probably doesn't have the traffic to pull it off unless it can differentiate itself from the already crowded competition.

[wavemode]

Ads make sense in an AI search engine product like Perplexity. ChatGPT could try to make a UI like that.

But the thing is, the world already has an AI search engine. It's called Google, and it's already heavily integrated with Gemini. Why would people switch?

[herbst]

You can "transport" this brain/cortex by just asking the AI to export itself and what it knows in a format another AI would understand as import.

[bncndn0956]

this is my horror as well. I don't mind my youtube account to be blocked but what about all the recommendations that I have curated to my liking. It will be huge chunk of lost time to rebuild and insert my preferences into the algorithm. increasingly "our preferences shaped by time and influences and encounters both digital and offline" are as much about us as we are physically.

[curioussquirrel]

You could ask GPT for what it knows about you and use it to seed your personal preferences to a new model/app. Not perfect and probably quite lossy, but likely much better than starting from scratch.

[youtubee3]

I have no YouTube account, and it can figure out my viewing history with just watching a few of my favorite channels usually... including specific videos I watched years ago.

So I wouldn't worry about it.

[tofuahdude]

Same situation over here. Multiple family members only know chatgpt / think that chatgpt knows them and have never heard of the competitors.

[dragonwriter]

> Google will do just what Microsoft did with Internet Explorer and bundle Gemini in for 'Free' with their already other profitable products and established ad-funded revenue streams.

“will do”? Is there any Google product they haven't done that with already?

[jmyeet]

Oh God I love the analogy of OpenAI being Netscape. As someone who was an adult in the 1990s, this is so apt. Companies at that time were trying to build a moat around the World Wide Web. They obviously failed. I've thought that OpenAI too would fail but I've never thought about it like Netscape and WWW.

OpenAI should be looking at how Google built a moat around search. Anyone can write a Web crawler. Lots of people have. But no one else has turned search into the money printing machine that Google has. And they've used that to fund their search advantage.

I've long thought the moat-buster here will be China because they simply won't want the US to own this future. It's a national security issue. I see things like DeepSeek is moat-busting activity and I expect that to intensify.

Currently China can't buy the latest NVidia chips or ASML lithography equipment. Why? Because the US said so. I don't expect China to tolerate this long term and of any country, China has desmonstrated the long-term commitment to this kind of project.

[dbspin]

Literally got an email this morning from Google, to say my Google One plan now 'includes AI benefits' - including

"More access to Gemini 3 Pro, our most capable model More access to Deep Research in the Gemini app Video generation with limited access to Veo 3.1 Fast in the Gemini app More access to image generation with Nano Banana Pro Additional AI credits for video generation in Flow and Whisk Access Gemini directly in Google apps like Gmail and Docs" [Thanks but no thanks]

[asdfman123]

I know it's been said before but it's slightly insane they're trying to compete on a hot new tech with a company with 1) a top notch reputation for AI and 2) the largest money printer that has ever existed on the planet.

Feel like the end result would always be that while Google is slow to adjust, once they're in the race they're in it it.

[margorczynski]

The problem for Google is that there is no sensible way to monetize this tech and it undercuts their main money source which is search.

On top of that the Chinese seem to be hellbent to destroy any possible moat the US companies might create by flooding the market with SOTA open-source models.

Although this tech might be good for software companies in general - it does reduce the main cost they have which is personnel. But in the long run Google will need to reinvent itself or die.

[kelipso]

Gemini has been in Google search for a while now. I use it somewhat often when I search for something and want follow up questions. I don’t see any ads in Gemini but maybe I would see it if I search for ads relevant things idk. But I definitely use google search more often because Gemini is there and probably that goes for a lot of people.

[golfer]

Ads are already appearing in Google search AI overviews [1]. AI overviews have 2 billion users at the moment.

[1] https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/16297775?hl=en

[woopwoop]

Maybe? But you could have written this same thing in 1999 with OpenAI and Google replaced by Google and Yahoo, respectively.

[raw_anon_1111]

And Google had profits - not just revenue - early on and wasn’t setting $10 on fire to have a $1 in revenue.

[dmoy]

Well maybe not in 1999. Adwords didn't launch until 2000? Google's 1999 revenue was...... I forget, but it was incredibly small. Costs were also incredibly small too though, so this isn't a good analogy given the stated year of 1999.

[wat10000]

Google in 1999 was already far superior to Yahoo and other competitors. I don't think OpenAI is in a similar position there. It seems debatable as to whether they're even the best, let alone a massive leap ahead of everyone else the way Google was.

[Libidinalecon]

Google was better but it wasn't far superior to AltaVista is what I remember.

Yahoo was always more a directory of websites.

AltaVista was better than Lycos or Yahoo but then Google was faster, gave better results than AltaVista and the very minimal UI was something interesting. I quite liked AltaVista but I never went back to it after using Google either.

I might even say Gemini 3 is better than GPT5 than what Google was to AltaVista. GPT5 feels rather useless to me after my time now with Gemini.

[wat10000]

As I remember it (I was just starting college at the time), Google search was an absolute revelation. You could type in a search term and the first hit would usually be what you wanted. AltaVista required a lot of looking through results to find the right thing and messing around with boolean operators. People switched over and never looked back. Google went from zero to a substantial majority market share in only about one year.

[fragmede]

> Google was better but it wasn't far superior to AltaVista is what I remember.

Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but I remember it being significantly better. Alta Vista, you'd have to dig into page 8 before getting to the good stuff. History is written by the victors, as they say, but I remember Google search results being significantly better than Altavista. It wouldn't be until two decades later that I got to work there though.

[ur-whale]

Agree.

And GOOG is not a one trick poney any more, by far, especially when it comes to revenue.

Can't say the same of OpenAI

[TulliusCicero]

Google was immediately better than Yahoo, that's why people switched en masse.

Same thing happen with Internet Explorer and Chrome, or going from Yahoo mail/Hotmail to Gmail.

[vachina]

OpenAI has tons of funnels for their products. Azure’s AI smoke and mirrors offerings uses openAI behind the scenes, big with enterprise users (who has a lot of money)

[mips_avatar]

Gemini can't be bundled for free unless they figure out how to make gemini flash 3.0 significantly cheaper to inference than 2.5

[HDThoreaun]

It can be bundled for "free" if they raise the price of google workspace. LLMs are right now most valuable as an enterprise productivity software assistant. Very useful to have a full suite of enterprise productivity software in order to sell them.

[whywhywhywhy]

Or put ads in it

[vondur]

I don't think the Government would let them fail, so long as the specter of the Chinese becoming dominant in AI is a thing.

[TacticalCoder]

> Google will do just what Microsoft did with Internet Explorer and bundle Gemini in for 'Free' with their already other profitable products and established ad-funded revenue streams.

Just some numbers to show what OpenAI is against:

    GMail users: nearing 2 billion
    Youtube MAU: 2.5 billion
    active Android devices: 4 billion (!)
    Market cap: 3.8 trillion (at a P/E of 31)

So on one side you've got this behemoth with, compared to OpenAI's size, unlimited funding. The $25 bn per year OpenAI is after is basically a parking ticket for Google (only slightly exaggerating). Behemoth who came with Gemini 3 Pro "thinking" and Nano Banana (that name though) who are SOTA.

And on the other side you've got the open-source weights you mentioned.

When OpenAI had its big moment HN was full of comments about how it was game over for Google for search was done for. Three years later and the best (arguably the best) model gives the best answer when you search... Using Google search.

Funny how these things turns out.

Google is atm the 3rd biggest cap in the world: only Apple and NVidia are slightly ahead. If Google is serious about its AI chips (and it looks like they are) and see the fuck-ups over fuck-ups by Apple, I wouldn't be surprised at all if Alphabet was to regain the number one spot.

That's the company OpenAI is fighting: a company that's already been the biggest cap in the entire world and that's probably going to regain that spot rather sooner than later and that happens to have crushed every single AI benchmark when Gemini 3 Pro came out.

I had a ChatGPT subscription. Now I'm using Gemini 3 Pro.

[redwood]

You just made it clear who needs to acquire openai.. it's going to be Apple! (Jonny Ive already there).

And great points on the Google history.. let's not forget they wrote the original Transformers paper after all

[adgjlsfhk1]

the branding is all wrong. I could see Apple buying anthropic, but OpenAI is exactly the wrong ai company for Apple. openai is the tacky, slop based ai company. their main value is the brand and the users, but Apple already has a strong brand and billions of users. Apple needs an ai company with deployment experience and a good model, but paying for a brand and users doesn't make sense for them.

[ascorbic]

> An innovative product with no means of significant revenue generation.

OpenAI has annualized revenue of $20bn. That's not Google, but it's not insignificant.

[ethin]

It is insignificant when they're spending more than $115bn to offer their service. And yes, I say "more than," not because I have any inside knowledge but because I'm pretty sure $115bn is a "kind" estimate and the expenditure is probably higher. But either way, they're running at a loss. And for a company like them, that loss is huge. Google could take the loss as could Microsoft or Amazon because they have lots of other revenue sources. OAI does not.

[Spooky23]

Google is embedding Gemini into Chrome Developer Tools. You can ask for an analysis of individual network calls in your browser by clicking a checkbox. That's just an example of the power of platform. They seem to be better at integration than Microsoft.

OpenAI has this amazing technology and a great app, but the company feels like some sort of financial engineering nightmare.

[cruffle_duffle]

To be fair the CEO of OpenAI is also a crypto bro. Financial engineering is right up their wheelhouse.

[cmiles8]

We live in crazy times, but given what they’ve spent and committed to that’s a drop in the bucket relative to what they need to be pulling in. They’re history if they can’t pump up the revenue much much faster.

Given that we’re likely at peak AI hype at the moment they’re not well positioned at all to survive the coming “trough of disillusionment” that happens like clockwork on every hype cycle. Google, by comparison, is very well positioned to weather a coming storm.

[XorNot]

Google survives because I still Google things, and the phone I'm typing this on is a Google product.

Whereas I haven't opened the ChatFPT bookmark in months and will probably delete it now that I think about it.

[scrollop]

RIP privacy.

Hello Stasi Google and its full personalised file on XorNot.

Google knows when you're about to sneeze.

[cheald]

And a $115b burn rate. They're toast if they can't figure out how to stay on top.

[nfRfqX5n]

Could say that about any AI company that isn’t at the top as well

[elAhmo]

You can say it about the AI companies, but Google or Microsoft are far from AI companies.

[tartoran]

That's a good point. Google was sleeping on AI and wasn't able to come up with a product before OpenAI and they only scrambled to come out with something when OpenAi became all the rage. Big companies are hard to budge and move in a new direction.

[hbn]

Google and Microsoft have existing major money printing businesses to keep their AI business afloat and burn money for a while. That's how Microsoft broke into gaming (and then squandered it years later for unrelated incompetence)

OpenAI doesn't have that.

[echelon]

Every F500 CEO told their team "have an AI strategy ASAP".

In a year, when the economy might be in worse shape, they'll ask their team if the AI thing is working out.

What do you think happens to all the enterprise OpenAI contracts at that point? (Especially if the same tech layperson CEOs keep reading Forbes and hearing Scott Galloway dump on OpenAI and call the AI thing a "bubble"?)

[riku_iki]

> What do you think happens to all the enterprise OpenAI contracts at that point?

they will go to google if it wins the AI race.

[raw_anon_1111]

I will change a few lines of code and use another AI model?

[echelon]

Are all of their sales their code gen model? And isn't there a lot of competition in the code gen space from Google and Anthropic?

I'd imagine they sold these to enterprise:

https://openai.com/business/

"ChatGPT for Business", sold per seat

"API Platform"

I could see the former getting canned if AI isn't adding value.

Developers can change the models they use frequently, especially with third party infrastructure like OpenRouter or FAL.

[bangaladore]

Yeah- given all top AI models are more and more generalists, as time goes on there is less and less reason to use one over another.

[raw_anon_1111]

It’s really even easier than that. I already do all my work on AWS and use Bedrock that hosts every popular model and its own except for OpenAIs closed source models.

I have a reusable library that lets me choose between any of the models I choose to support or any new model in the same family that uses the same request format.

Every project I’ve done, it’s a simple matter of changing a config setting and choosing a different model.

If the model provider goes out of business, it’s not like the model is going to disappear from AWS the next day.

[echelon]

> Bedrock

This sounds so enterprise. I've been wanting to talk to people that actually use it.

Why use Bedrock instead of OpenRouter, Fal, etc.? Doesn't that tie you down to Amazon forever?

Isn't the API worse? Aren't the p95 latencies worse?

The costs higher?

[deaux]

Bedrock hosts Gemini models? Incredibly popular, currently SOTA, biggest competitor to OpenAI, those models? I don't think it does.