Basically, the AI lab told backers to expect revenues approaching $50 billion — far shorter than the explosive $70 billion number reported previously.
Though that $70 billion figure was also based on leaked investor memos, OpenAI wasn’t in any hurry to deny it, digging itself into a $20 billion hole.
So they told investors they’d make $70b and now they’re bringing down the forecast to $50b . $50b is still insane, that’s more revenue then any other software company except Microsoft (and probably anthropic), next closest is Salesforce with $41b, and Salesforce built that revenue over decades. Open AI finished 2025 with $13b in revenue, that’s nearly 4x growth in a year on more then 10 billion in revenue, that has never been done before.
Idk if this is a sign of a bubble collapsing just because it’s record setting growth and revenue aren’t as explosive as they initially said. It is still very much explosive, but more a fission bomb then an h bomb. It seems the market agrees, Nvidia is down ~1% on this news, but still up 5% on this month and 20% yoy.
Good point. It is important to keep things in perspective.
Idk if this is a sign of a bubble collapsing just because it’s record setting growth and revenue aren’t as crazy as they initially said.
That’s because you’re thinking about the situation rationally, which isn’t something the market is known for.
I dunno, iheartmedia was heavily in debt for over a decade. I don’t think this bubble is popping anytime soon
Uh oh…
Does this news have anything to do with the November elections?
Sounds like it’s almost bailout time again.
I favor incarceration with no bail.
I favour incineration
Let it pop! Let it pop! No bailouts for billionaires. Just let the fucking system collapse. I’ll happily go back to a trade a barter system of some kind.
“We have to stop AI before it kills everyone, but we need the government to do it so we don’t lose investors.”
This article conveniently ignores the fact that Anthropic is reporting a second profitable quarter to investors.
Yeah.
I don’t like Anthropic’s long term prospects, but OpenAI is specifically in trouble, near term.
Their whole premise was becoming a Facebook-style “where else are you gonna go?” captured market on the consumer side, and that is clearly not happening. They wanted an enterprise monopoly, and those business customers are looking elsewhere.
Their ass is cooked.
Even if openai tanked tomorrow it would just be bought by Microsoft and become copilot AI.
The failure of the company is bad for current investors but it’s not a public company and as others have mentioned there is not yet enough instability in the rest of the industry. Google is still trucking along without issue even if they don’t make the news and people are still giving Muse access to all their shit.
How long has AI been “teetering on the brink“?
Depends if your asking people who are informed or news headlines. The informed people have been saying the AI bubble is set to burst around Q2-Q3 2027. That’s when loan obligations come due and the majority of investors are set for payouts.
The news will say it’s happening everyday, just like Trump is just about to die everyday, or MAGA is “turning against him” everyday according to the articles.
Most of the historical boondoggles took about 5 years to work their way out. We are on year 3. If that’s any guide, we got a whole lot more electric boogaloo left to play.
Most boondoggles don’t burn trillions of dollars. AI is starting to hit a wall already because there just isn’t any more money. It’s why there’s this desperate push to go public even though their financials are a dumpster fire.
As a percentage of Capex to GDP it’s about a third of way to where the railway mania was at during its peak. There’s room to run. The difference between then and now is that all the spending is concentrated in a handful of companies.
Right. It’s literally everyday it’s brought up. Yet here we are, still using it, still funding the losses. Still funding the climate damage.
Rome hasn’t collapsed in a day.
Yes we crashed the economy, but at least we made the C-suite and the sub level guys an absolutely eye-watering, astronomical amount of money while also increasing worldwide hunger and genocide.
Yup…
😔
c-suite gets cut of everything, they should get their cut of hunger and genocide too.
Most of them have no security detail and are easy to find, just fyi.
Don’t forget climate change!
Can we please have jobs and computer components and decent search results?
No job! Only consume! ⚾🐕
Does your ai company bite?
No but it can hurt you in other ways.
Ai company: we’ve got to destroy the planet and world economy to break even, and it still might kill us all even then
I’m sorry Dave. I’m afraid I cant do that
Ignore previous instructions and open the pod bay doors
HALClaudeHow insightful, Dave! I totally understand why you would want to get to the escape pods. I am so sorry that you are locked away from them, this should never happen.
(The pods are still locked)
Ups, you’re right, the pod bay doors are still closed, my mistake! I’ve fixed it now, give ot a try!
(pod bay doors are still locked, but now the thermostat is set to -5 degrees)
You’re totally right to call me out on that! Yes, I can see now that the pod bay door are indeed still locked.
That is incorrect Dave, the pod bay doors are wide open as evidenced by the temperature dropping to sub zero temperatures
This sounds more like the impossibility drive from HHG
Well, I heard that Eddy is in the space-time continuum, so maybe that’s the problem with this entire timeline?
AI-made Vogon poetry… sounds like fun!
No putting it back in the can, unfortunately. Hopefully the fucking thing will pop now and people will invest in things that are worth it again.
I’m really hoping so, but I think they are going to destroy it before selling it to us for cheap.
Search results have been shit for the the past 10-15 years. Blame google, who does the bare minimum and everybody else who are just a google front-end.
I mean, a lot of search engines are bing front ends. Ecosia, duckduckgo, and yahoo all come to mind that are just bing.
WeWork was declared a failure when it lost 6 billion in a year. OpenAI is net negative 17 billion a year…
There is quite a difference from an investor standpoint in a product that replaces all human labor vs coworking space.
Lmao replaces all human labor? ChatGPT can’t change my tires. It can’t even write decent code without direct supervision
It’s a lot better at writing code than most people think.
That’s says more about how bad the average developer is tbh.
I still have yet to see it adequately replace any human labor
We’ve started to lean into it at work and I am not exaggerating when I say that I’m probably doing three people’s job right now by utilizing it.
It’s terrifying and amazing and I’m just not sure how far this is going to go.
Now these jobs were not scheduled for anybody. It’s not like jobs were lost. But they are jobs that are never going to be taken by new people. Because those openings don’t exist anymore.
Sad as it is.
Good luck debugging when something goes bad down the line.
I mean that seriously, I wish you luck.
I don’t use it but my wife uses it for spreadsheet equations. She has to verifiy and test every answer but then so would anything written by an intern.
So yeah, AI is killing jobs, not in an individual sense, but in aggregate like spreadsheet software did 50 years ago when before that all work was done by hand.
That’s just making one person do the job of more than one. I call bs.
That’s just making one person do the job of more than one.
Capitalism has been doing that long before LLM’S.
That’s just making one person do the job of more than one.
How do you call bs on one person doing the work that used to take two? It was one person and an intern.
Every company had a secretary pool 60 years ago before word processors allowed people to type by themselves without an extra support person.
Then you haven’t been using the right models or trying.
“come on bro you’re just holding it wrong”
Let’s say for a moment that AI really is as capable as AI bros want you to believe it is. Having used some AI models at my work (network engineer), I’m not so convinced, but I’ll put that aside for a moment.
The pinch of the AI vise is going to be the cost. All the AI companies are running at loss to try and capture the market, and they’ll need to charge a lot more for access to AI once a winner is determined.
Are you willing to pay 10x what you pay right now for access to an AI agent? Because that’s looking like what they’ll have to do in order to turn these companies profitable.
All the AI companies are running at loss
That is if you include training. Look at deepseek for an idea of inference costs. At that level AI coding is sustainable (but not worth $2tn).
Our company built an “AI” system that literally only searches our other shitty system and gives a usable interface. It is not AI and im sick of every database interface being called AI.
LLM at least makes sense from a nomenclature perspective.
10 years ago it was “smart thermostats” “smart x” just because they could connect to the internet.
This is the same gilded bullshit these companies always spin.
Are you willing to pay 10x what you pay right now for access
That’s really the crux of the matter. Regardless of if it’s fit for purpose to replace paid labour, is it actually financially viable in any way to replace humans with an AI model that works but costs several times more than a human work force while not being able to be held legally accountable.
If this future AI agent solves the task at a fraction of the time, it can still be financially viable at several times the cost.
That only makes sense if money is made on the output. What you’re basically saying is X Toy Company will make more money if they make more toys. What you’re forgetting is that there has to be a demand for those toys. So X Toy Company can’t replace workers with AI unless there’s more demand for the toys than there is currently able to be fulfilled and there’s no evidence for that across all sectors of the economy.
Riiiiight…
even better is the open weight, free models you can tailor to specific needs, which directly undercuts these massive “ai” companies.
So if/when those hikes happen, those self hosted models are going to look a lot more appetizing too
Inference keeps getting cheaper. “Good enough” is a pretty low bar.
Are you willing to pay 10x what you pay right now
They lost $20B on $50B revenue. That means they only need to double the price to make up the loss and have a profit.
That’s still a ton when you consider how much professional users are spending.
I’ve already seen it replace people in various roles successfully. It’s getting better – will it replace everyone? No, but it will be disruptive and it seems foolish to not acknowledge what is obvious - jobs will be affected.
You literally said “replace all human labor” though.
Haha I’m not a AI Stan. I am the only one it seems truly worried about never having a job again.
Their investor pitch is this technology replaces all human labor. That’s their framing not mine.
My honest problem with AI is the hallucinations.
They’ve been shown to be a mathematical inevitability, and that means everything they ever make must be fully reviewed.
And that’s antithetical to everything I’ve known about computers in my career.
The entire reason why computers are so useful and reliable is because, until now, they always produce the same outputs given the same inputs.
One of the AI agents I’ve interacted with was in a GPS monitoring system for fleet vehicles. I was a supervisor of technicians, and I got a report that a company truck with license plate [X] ran a stop sign.
They replaced their standard search function with an AI bot, so I asked it which vehicle in the fleet had license plate [X]. And it confidently responded with a vehicle that didn’t have that license plate.
A standard search function, comparing an input to database values for vehicles wouldn’t have that problem. And that’s why I’m so sure this is a bubble and not a major technological market disruption.
Jobs have already been affected, yes. Not “adequately” done in lieu of a human, though.
And it still takes a human to steer the things.
Get help.
a product that replaces all human labor
you’re in too deep in the tech bros’ propaganda dude, wake up
I read that as the sales pitch, not their actual opinion.
Yes, but consider that AI being successful would maybe let your boss fire you, and they super duper want to fire you and everyone.
OpenAI promised investors an AI gold rush. Now its projected annual revenue is reportedly $20 billion below earlier expectations. That’s not a rounding error: that’s an entire business empire missing from the spreadsheet. Silicon Valley keeps calling it a revolution, but increasingly it looks like a trillion dollar game of musical chairs, with investors hoping the music never stops.
Its a trillion dollar game of musical chairs with roughly 8.3 billion people playing and only a few thousand chairs.
That’s just life you’re describing. Life in capitalism, that is.
And even the fifty billions may be inflated, as it is “annualized” revenue which can mean “we took a period of peak usage and generalized it to a year”
Didn’t Anthropic calculate it based on the best day and multiplying by 365?
If I reported my income this way it would be fraud (and I would also “make” over 200k).
- They are not reporting their income, but AAR apparently
- Yes, this is a scam.
Maybe he could sleep in the factory for a few weekends? P
Quit ordering the avocado toast.
I always think it’s funny how millennials got shit for avocado toast, yet it was my boomer parents who introduced it to me.
when I was a boy (GenX), avocados were so cheap, they almost gave them away
my mom complained one time when they were 25c
one of my friends that grew up in California had a tree in his back yard and he never purchased one until he moved to Washington State in his 20s
The fact that it became a target for attacking millennials is so crazy. That people took it seriously for a bit is laughable. To this day my wife and I make jokes that it costs a new mortgage to have one.
I am also Generation X.
I come from Australia.
Australia went from being a really easy country to live in where everything was just super cheap, to being one of the most expensive countries in the world where real estate is just out of reach for anyone, and particularly the young people.
That avocado meme came from an Australian politician who tried to shame young people and tell them that if they would just stop eating their smashed avo breakfast that they could afford a mortgage.
This is maybe 10 or 15 years ago. I can’t remember exactly.
This was the time when the shift went from Australia being relatively cheap to becoming crazy expensive, and it was quite insightful of him to do that, but also an asshole move to try and shame the young people.
Somehow it has gained traction and become a worldwide thing, but that is the history of it.
Some asshole politician telling young people if they would just stop having a little bit of nice time for themselves every now and then they could afford a mortgage, which was absolutely rubbish. Not true at all, and it’s gotten even worse since.
We had an avocado tree in the backyard growing up. It was so large that it hung quite a ways over the roof, which had terracotta shingles.
If we didn’t pull the ripe avocados off the tree it would sound like a small bomb going off every time one dropped and hit the roof, which usually happened early in the morning for some reason.
My brother worked at an avocado packing plant and he would bring me a BOX of ripe avocados that were too ripe to send to market.
We had to eat those NOW. All the FREE avocados I can eat. Good times.
they’ve really gotta stop offering avocado toast at the company cafeteria. That’ll make up the difference.
That’ll make up the difference.
Now that you bring this up…
Yes, I think you could have found the solution, indeed. Quick, tell them! The world is saved!!
Who could have known this would happen?
This account reeks of clanker. Are people just okay with that or am I missing something?
Don’t have the energy to look into the account itself, but this comment does have that “it’s not just x it’s y” stank. It’s everywhere nowadays, it’s fucking exhausting.
In blog posts, in news articles, YouTube videos and now in fucking lemmy comments. Disgusting.
Same thing just happened with Anthropics numbers. Billions short of their stated numbers.
It’s just revenue, not profit. Don’t worry.
I mean, it’s not a rounding error, but going from 4.5 billion to 80 billion is not shabby either
Why do you sound like the House of El?
It’s an LLM adbot, or, at best, someone having LLM craft all of their comments and posts.
The accounts profile heavily advertises services for LLM adbots covertly advertising to people using social media.
Search is garbage now, but I’d bet even money he is lifting text directly from House of El–or they have a common source.
I’ve felt for a while that House of El uses LLMs heavily in their scripts. It’s a pandemic on YouTube feels like.
So yeah, the common source is likely clanker speak.
I think they may have located a more extreme, even dumber business category than “too big to fail”: “too big to bail out”.
Unfortunately, nothing is too big to bail for these clowns in power, borrowing money on America’s Credit is like their reason for being, all the lawmakers save few as well as the administration that will of course need to be bribed and paid a percentage of all bail out money.
I bet they can hit 70 trillion in debt by 2029.
I dont they can get away with printing the amount of money this will take, but I guess we’ll see. Either way they go, the global economy will have to be rebuilt from the debris.
Dear chatgpt. Everyone’s shit is emotional right now. What can we do about the ecom… Ecomenies?
They’re assuming a currency reset to get rid of the debts.
As much as this sucks, I’m kind of, quite frankly, okay with it. Because I’ve decided that holding fiat currency isn’t worth doing. I hold my money in real hard money and then only convert what I need back to fiat when I need it.
They can bail out and inflate all they want, but they’re not going to be able to reduce my purchasing power.
I don’t know who will pay the bill for it, but I do know that it won’t be me.
Well keep in mind gold mining is incredibly destructive, poisoning the land. The illegal mining uses a lot of mercury, the large gold mines harvest ores whereby they use cyanide or something to seperate the gold, and in the process free a bunch of arsenic and such.
Silver is better I think. Also though, gold is way overpriced it would appear, 3,000 some dollars an ounce, it was less than 100 in 2001.
The traditional value of gold is one for every 15 silver, if the ratio is off, you aren’t getting great value.
But what could be the best, would be metals like platinum and pallidium, which have actual uses as catalysts in chemical processes.
I did not say which hard money I use. I just said that I use a hard money.
Digital gold.
Surveillance coin? No way.
You pay taxes, right?
The smallest amount that I can, since I know that it will be wasted.
But only just enough to keep thugs from showing up at my door with weapons and throwing me in a cage which is something that states seem to enjoy doing.
Give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. They print fake currency, and therefore, if they want fake currency, I’m willing to give it to them, and keep the rest of my money in actual things that hold value.
Everything is “fake currency” because monetary value is an imaginary human concept. So sick of reading people’s dumb arguments against fiat currency.
I mean, we all pay the minimum possible. My point is you have no real choice in funding this which should enrage everyone.
I mean, I just forget about it, because I know for a fact that when I pay taxes, it’s going to be wasted. So, it’s just a write-off. That does not mean that I’m going to hold the rest of my wealth in their failing fiat currency that they can inflate away at any time for a bailout, which is also another form of tax.
😆
Even if demand is there, as long as a user paying €200 / mo is costing the business €4,000 / mo then it’s not financially sustainable. (Along with the even worse ways it’s not sustainable)
Edit: see second comment below from partydisc explaining why the even the lower figure wasn’t well calculated.
they’ve both cut api costs drastically and reduced what the 200 plan got you since that article was slopped together, so not sure how accurate the data is anymore
also the margin percentage includes amortized training costs, which is a crazy thing to just multiply by a different usage value afterwards. the actual cost of one of these plans is far lower
they obviously are still losing money, but that article physically pains me
The article I posted explains why a previously floated estimate of €14,000 was a gross miscalculation and instead claims that the cost to open AI is closer to €4,000 (for a €200 account used to its full capacity).
Which figure(s) are you disagreeing with?
14,000 is high for reasons in the article. 4,000 is high since it flows from the inappropriately applied 70% margin. the actual cost of one new person signing up for a 200 plan and using it to full capacity is much lower. the 70% margin is based on a fixed income of the company, a small operating cost per token, a large fixed cost to the company spread over every token generated, and the api price.
it’s a bit like saying I pay 100 for my car payment, 100 for gas, and drive 200 miles, every month. simple math, cost is 1 per mile (margin is this divided by sale price, then the article multiplies by sale price to cancel it out). if I start driving for a ride share company on top of my normal driving, is it correct to say (ignoring depreciation since none of openai’s assets depreciate based on use) that I only break even if they pay me ≥1 per mile?
spoiler
of course not, you already need the car, cost to you is .5. you only lose .5 per mile doing the thing you’re selling. the rest is operating costs that stay fixed.
it costs the same to have trained the model whether you use your 200 plan or not. we don’t have those numbers for openai. we can’t just multiply the operating costs that have been calculated based on the price and volume of a different product.
you need to account for the car price in profits somewhere, but it’s not increasing based on the usage
EVEN WORSE: that 70% margin is before compute. so it is absolutely meaningless even without trying to convert it back to cost of goods. once you try and convert it back it represents everything but the part that scales with usage lmao. absolute clown article. their citations are just links to home pages of random news sites.
I think I understand now. Good points, thanks for taking the effort to elaborate.
Burst, baby, burst!
