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Comment by siva7 | Hacker News Reader

They have hundred millions of paying subscribers, that kind of commercial success you could not even dream of when search engines and ads became a thing. Yet it's not enough. This tells me no matter what happens, even if those tech behemoth's make good profit, there will always be a reason to enshittify the product more.

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It sounds like you think OpenAI is a profitable business? As far as I understand, it’s not.

OpenAI is projected to generate $12-14 billion in yearly revenue in 2025 (annualized from a single month), but expect to lose around 8 billion USD, implying the margins are negative.

OpenAI has raised a total of ~$60 billion.

I think they need to show investors a huge and growing cashflow to keep the show going.

OpenAI has a subscription revenue stream that's more than sufficient to keep current basic operations going. It is losing money because most of that money is spent on research, more and more GPUs, very expensive people and other capital expenditure.

Of course, they can't just retreat to selling their basic services since some other company would train and produce a marginally better model.

So it's a paradoxical situation. They're moving in contradictory directions - both to become a thing so valuable they'd only need to sell subscriptions and towards a mote if they don't reach that "AGI" thing. No reason being flexible would displease their shareholders but there are many other questions to answer here (who gets AGI raptures, who gets the Skynet/Terminator treatment, who decides, etc).

Right, so given that R&D is not optional lest they fall behind, they need to find another revenue stream.

The valuation of OAI would be peanuts if it stopped reinvesting too. Which will destroy the value of equity and therefore employees certainly wont be happy.

Im not really sure where Altman is going. As time goes on, it seems the walls are closing in and he's just throwing all he can to keep the hype alive.

You cant escape fundamentals forever, I dont care who you are.

They have hundreds of millions of subscribers, but the vast majority of them are not paying, and more importantly, are not monetized in any way.

With increasing competition from all sides driving down the margins. Sure ChatGpt is a household name now, but if Microsoft/Google offer the same thing for half the price, plenty of cost conscious subscribers will bail to the cheapest offering.

Hey man, take a step away from the keyboard. Instead imagine the every day person. Would they rather click, scroll, swipe and pull out credit cards across multiple websites - or just ask their digital assistant to do it?

The defaulting to negativity will really eat some communities up from the inside.

Does the average user does this? Granted, I’m not i. the USA, but does people really order that much on unusual websites?

You see negativity, I see disappointment that OpenAI isn’t trying to innovate, and instead hoping they can replay Google Search’s history for themselves

Chat windows and voice assistants are a terrible user experience for the average person. This doesn't change that.

I am not so sure about that. The modern web has become complicated/unusable enough that I can see a lot of people prefering a chat interface over having to click through this unholy mess. I might be biased, as I have to deal with accessibility ussues on a daily basis. However, there is a whole demographic we're currently leaving behind. There are a lot of people around who simply don't try to use the Internet to get things done, because they are overwhelmed with how it works. My mother doesnt even want to click on a YouTube link sent to her via WhatsApp, because she would leave the well-known app and have to deal with the web... However, I can imagine her using an agentic interface to get things done, although not right now, maybe in 2 years.

I don’t understand how you can make this statement in the midst of chatGPT being the fastest growing consumer app in history.

I think there's a difference between a typical website chat window and how many people would use ChatGPT. The latter has tables, images and links which is enough to build up comparisons, order sheets and then ultimately have a format for confirming a purchase. I use it a lot for doing basic home construction comparisons (materials, volumes, etc) and could definitely see it getting to the point that it organised an order for me to submit, and eventually to where the submission and payment were within the chat.

A voice assistant doesn't give you that option to review, but maybe it'd work for ordering fast food. A small chat window could grow to work for simple purchases like takeaway food or small hardware, etc.

That’s exactly what the folks at Amazon thought when they came up with Alexa. Have you ever bought anything online by asking Alexa to do it? Have you ever seen anyone else do it?

The fact that you're being downvoted over this is proof that people here work and live in a bubble. People value convenience and are willing to pay for it, and if OpenAI is able to advance convenience through these actions, they'll make billions.

I think the "every-day person" simply isn't wealthy enough to (persistently) care about that level of delegated convenience versus the risks of getting the wrong product or ripped off.

> They have hundred millions of paying subscribers

They have hundreds of millions of users in total (free tier included), with around 10-15 million paying users.

Those subscriptions are at a loss

You just discovered the (capitalist) idea of growth... Any management of a big corp not going for the seemingly endless growth idea is going to be fired by their shareholders pretty quick.

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