OpenAI misses revenue, is the AI bubble bursting? | Hacker News Reader

OpenAI misses revenue, is the AI bubble bursting?

cnbc.com

57 pointsoomuinio36 comments

Is this article really worth sharing? A speculative headline with no numbers, no estimates, 0 data.

Feels like click bait and HN is submitting to the bait.

Oh you want numbers?

Here’s a number: 3.5

That’s the number of years until we achieve AGI according to Sam Altman: https://techresearchonline.com/news/sam-altman-predicts-agi-...

This company’s current valuation is entirely speculative. So if you’re going to criticize the article, maybe direct some of that skepticism towards the company in question.

Isn’t it general knowledge AGI has been achieved ?

You don't need numbers when the person responsible for the numbers says they are bad.

The billions being thrown at openai and anthropic are speculative

This CNBC article is based on a Wall Street Journal article.

https://archive.ph/mTiIs

OpenAI Misses Key Revenue, User Targets in High-Stakes Sprint Toward IPO By Berber Jin

The company’s CFO and board have questioned the wisdom of massive data-center spending in the face of slowing growth

Ah that explains handing models over to AWS to run in their data centers

Yeah I bet you’re right. Data centers are not a hobby.

OpenAI had worse models (GPT 5.2 and 5.4) at that time. But now the tables have turned. Would Anthropic face a similar situation since Opus 4.7 falls below expectations?

Claude and Claude Code are still quite useful even when considering the recent degradations, so I don't think corporate users will leave easily especially considering that they're subsidized by their companies. I think the most likely scenario is that Anthropic will remove the Max ($100 / $200) subscriptions (which were the sweet spot for most users) and opt for token-based prices instead, which will make the average cost 2x ~ 3x higher which will keep them afloat in terms of ROI. Performance will plateau though since model research cannot sustain itself any longer, and then it's only a matter of how fast the open-source Chinese models will catch up in efficiency.

a 2-3x pricing increase will also lose them customers and still they're likely to be bleeding cash like a stuck pig

Increasing cost will only make people embrace competitor or open source models.

What if the competitors are also expensive? If one of OpenAI and Anthropic raises prices, the other one will follow suit (since both have the same profitability problem).

Open source models currently look good on paper, but the flagship models are still quite huge and cannot be run efficiently on consumer hardware, thus having the same inference hosting cost issues (I'm assuming OpenAI and Anthropic has done a shit ton of optimizations already on their servers.) The main breakthrough needed is plainly cheaper and more efficient hardware (such as TPUs or Huawei Ascends), and how to scale infrastructure quickly without losing money.

Anthropic has since found and fixed the perf. problem: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/april-23-postmortem

OpenAI Misses Key Revenue, User Targets in High-Stakes Sprint Toward IPO

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47929510

Journos love bashing AI, knowing they will be replaced by it within months to a couple of years.

OK sam

I guess free tokens are over and most providers will move to token based billing soon.

"rapidly evolving industry"

That has always been wildly unprofitable…

As were a lot of big companies, like Amazon, until they weren’t.

These companies will not be able to keep making large improvements to their models as time goes on. You gotta remember to not be holding the bag when the music stops.

Gustafson would hard disagree with you, while Amdahl shares your pessimism.

I think Gustafson has better receipts... His main argument is that software will update to take advantage of new parallelism in hardware. And that's definitely been the case.

AI has ridiculous levels exploitable parallelism. It'll scale up and out.

God I hope so

The Dot Com bubble burst and it didn't materially affect anything. Some of the things that failed then even came back later. Buying stuff online ate retail, sadly enough. Some dumb business plans went away, but the core of the commercial web never did. There's an idea, mostly from the anti-AI folks, that AI will magically "go away" once the bubble finally bursts and I hate to burst any more bubbles here but AI isn't going back in the bottle. For better or worse.

Yeah exactly. It’s pretty certain that the AI bubble will burst. A few companies will have a hard time and disappear. For everyone else though, this will just be headlines in the news and AI will continue as it was.

This comment is a mandatory mention of Betteridge's law of headlines.

or so Sam Altman hopes

So quiet on HN you can hear crickets…

Chirp chirp

the more people talk the bigger te chance of it bursting so lots of people will just stay mute hoping it is not the time yet.

Silence is its own kind of loud.

The tide turned the past 2 months. Hype is fading away. This place was really unbearable back then, it’s not so bad now.

Anyone else think OpenAI and Anthropic should really be one company?

Why? I don't mind both of them going out of business.

Two birds with one stone thing maybe?

crazy idea but how about we force them to become a public entity since their entire product is built on our stolen IP?

No? Generally, competition is considered good

Reply on news.ycombinator.com