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Comment by sophia01 | Hacker News Reader

It's Coca Cola vs Pepsi. Yes some might even say Pepsi has been shown to taste better, but people still buy loads of Coke.

Of course the tech savvy enterprises will use the best models. But the plumber down the road doesn't care whether she asks Gemini or ChatGPT about the sizing of some fittings.

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right, but casual users aren't paying (and won't ever)

Users aren't paying for Google or Facebook either. Advertisers do.

Right, again, even if you take every advertiser in the world and shove them in a dungeon and then point a cannon at them and say "give me all the money you have", you won't even have 1/10th the money you need.

Everyone is vastly, vastly overestimating advertising. Advertising is a side hustle, because the product is the main hustle.

Yet Google built an empire on advertising money alone, and Facebook became one of the biggest company in the world on that business as well.

I think your are the one vastly underestimate advertising.

Yes, and if you take all that money, it's not even 1/10 enough.

Consumers can spend what they can spend. Not even 1 quadrillion dollars in advertising can change that. There is a hard, hard cap to the value of advertisement because of that. It's just how the thing works.

Please tell me how being the third and 7th biggest companies in the world is “not even 1/10 enough” …

“Enough” for what exactly?

It's not enough to pay for the size of the rollout the AI companies are doing. The difference between Google and OpenAI is that Google's add revenue comes at basically 0 cost. Google serves multiple adds for every search, and actually completing the search costs a tiny fractions of a cent (the majority of which is the cost to figure out what add to display). OpenAI is in a totally different boat. They get a similar number of adds per search, but each query will cost them far more than a simple web search. A paragraph or a single image costs OpenAI over 1c to generate, so you can't even cover the marginal costs on ads alone (google adds cost ~.1c per view).

Furthermore, OpenAI has to make up for a ton of debt they are taking on. They've already lost $9B, and are planning on losing another $75B in the next 2 years. As such, they have a ton of digging to do to get themselves out of the massive hole they're digging.

> OpenAI is in a totally different boat. They get a similar number of adds per search, but each query will cost them far more than a simple web search. A paragraph or a single image costs OpenAI over 1c to generate

First of all, your numbers a off by an order of magnitude at least: even GPT-5 can generate 1000 tokens for 1c, which is much more than a paragraph.

And then again that's why my entire argument revolved around the fact that OpenAI would need to stop aiming for the technological edge. Deepseek generates 25k tokens for a cent and it's still a gigantic model. I'd you use a model comparable in size to gpt-oss-120b you can even increase that up to 100-200k tokens per cent (going from 32GB worth of active parameters, 32B at q8 for Deepseek, to 4GB, 8B using MXFP4 for gpt-oss-120b). That would mean being able to serve more than 100 answers per cent spent on inference.

If they can serve .1c worth of ads per request, that's 90% gross margin for you.

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