The AI Industry Is Losing | Hacker News Reader

The AI Industry Is Losing

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23 pointsspking16 comments

I cannot fathom being in a position of such privilege that this looks like "losing". I wish I could lose like this. I think most people would be extremely happy to be losers, if this is how we're defining the word.

> I wish I could lose like this.

You can.

1. Borrow 10x your annual income.

2. Spend 3x your monthly income, every month.

If you do that as an individual you are going to prison though.

This is a huge topic, but I think it's still too early to conclude that the AI industry is losing.

To me, this looks more like an iterative technology cycle. The frontier labs continue to improve the models, while the agents, tooling, infrastructure, and applications is evolving rapidly. So, as long as the feedback loop between model improvements and real-world adoption continues, short-term losses don't necessarily tell us much about the long-term trajectory.

I’m paying $100 per month for codex, idk if that’s them “losing”….? Although idk about big enterprise cos keeping their unlimited token/tokenmaxxin usage though API req

You forgot the other half of the equation aka how much it costs _them_ for you to use codex. (newsflash, it's likely more than 100$)

This mate has the best gig in the World. Write the same sh*t over and over, collect subscription dough and chill

Losing at what?

The author never states what would constitute winning

I would assume being profitable constitutes as winning when you're throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at a technology. OpenAI and Anthropic don't have a very obvious path to profitability.

The author is pretty obvious and exhaustive about what he means by "losing": AI capex bubble is unsustainable, AI revenue is circular, no meaningful AI compute demand outside of OpenAI and Anthropic, AI products are mediocre at best (and still heavily subsidized, at that), AI is causing various mental health crises, OpenAI lost $20.9 billion on $13 billion in revenue in 2025.

OpenAI spent $17.2 billion on Azure in 2025 making the infrastructure bill exceed total revenue by about $4 billion BEFORE even counting salaries, research, stock compensation or anything else.

I feel like the responses here are purposely obtuse and people are refusing to realistically evaluate the economics of Anthropic and OpenAI

> The author is pretty obvious and exhaustive about what he means by "losing": AI capex bubble is unsustainable, AI revenue is circular, no meaningful AI compute demand outside of OpenAI and Anthropic, AI products are mediocre at best (and still heavily subsidized, at that), AI is causing various mental health crises, OpenAI lost $20.9 billion on $13 billion in revenue in 2025.

So then it’s just profitability modulo “various mental health crises”

Obviously it's not. Would you like me to sit here and do the work of reading the article for you? Or are the numbers involved a bit too much for you to handle?

Continue shoving your fingers in your ears and closing your eyes to the absolute nonsense that is behind OpenAI and Anthropic's economics, it won't change the fact that their path to profitability doesn't exist.

So……profitability

Is the person defending Anthropic in the room with us?

But Anthropic would be profitable if they stop training cries

No seriously, I recently heart someone say that and it may even be correct. However I assume this only to be correct if a stop in training doesn't change the current revenue environment - which it absolutely would. I am still convinced a lot of demand for tokens is artificial in the sense that people buy tokens because thats what you do right now (and its convenient) not because the roi is so great.

> Losing at what?

Turning a profit? What else could a business lose at?

making money, making a moat, preventing china from easily getting to par with them with substantially less investment.

At making money

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