They're selling a commodity product in a Red Queen's Race. OpenAI, Anthropic, and whatever others get spun up while the gold rush is on are each building costly models at a vast cost to try to get a bit ahead of each other. The economics of this are ugly. The business of building massive LLMs looks more like air transport than the dot com gold rush in the '90s. There will probably be much useful stuff in the wreckage when it's all over, but I've not seen much to inspire confidence that the useful stuff will include profitable companies. This looks like it has all the makings of another WeWork, only this time with an epochal AI winter as the aftermath.
It's unfathomable to me that any of these companies have any kind of moat.
People here like to slag on google for being late to the chatbot party, but they've been using ML the entire time and integrating it into various products for ages. I kind of wonder if the only reason they were "behind" was the lawyers were less brazen about the copyright situation.
I agree with the commodity take, and I personally bet on Google eating everybody else's lunch eventually, because there's a lot of other business behind them and they can afford to undercut competitors. They aren't a one trick pony.
this whole thing produced some useful tools, if nothing else. I'll be able to use a few of them to keep warm during the next AI winter -- much like every other AI winter.
>This looks like it has all the makings of another WeWork, only this time with an epochal AI winter as the aftermath.
I'm as cynical as it gets on this forum, as evidenced by my comment history.
But you're comparing these AI companies to WeWork? Really?
WeWork was a real estate company operating in a historically favourable environment (0% interest rates) pretending to be a tech company. They literally rented office space. What do they have in common?
I notice there's a new generation of "grey beard" programmers constantly talking about how "useless" AI is for programming, and they can do everything faster. Meanwhile, there are tons of us out there who are paying $20, $30, $50 per month and upwards for these tool as they are, and wouldn't want to go without. Ever. And we have no idea where it's going to go. Maybe you're missing something?
WOW. These figures put the OpenAI valuation in perspective.
OpenAI: $3.6B revenue - people paying $2.7B for personal subscription (growth rate of 285% per year) - rest is AI
This would mean the latest OpenAI valuation of $156B is a P/E of about 43. For a company growing 285% per year ... that actually doesn't sound horrible. In fact, that's pretty good.
As others said, E is for Earnings but it's kind of understandable for it to be negative and use the Revenue metric as they are spending huge amount on R&D.
IMHO the bigger risk is the "AI" ending up not doing that much after all or their R&D not paying off(which is a risk, their SORA is nowhere to be found when Chinese AI companies are having its alternative in production. Maybe OpenAI isn't that far ahead and it's the language barrier that gives that impression? I don't know I don't speak Chinese but things are happening outside of the Anglosphere).
That's price to sales, not price to earnings. OpenAI's price to earnings, strictly speaking, is negative since it loses money. For comparison, Amazon's price to sales ratio is around 3.
How much of the "people willing to pay" market has already been exploited? I cannot see 285% growth continuing for more than a year or two more, at most, even with huge step-ups in quality.
the only way the valuation is put "in perspective" is if you estimate that we gonna have a race of heavy investments now to get to a point where the models are "good enough" and you no longer need to invest in training new ones, at which point you switch from running a immensely unprofitable business to a immensely profitable one.
the issue is that nobody knows when that will be the case (if ever) and it currently looks like whoever player is best equipped with capital to fund that race will have a winner takes all future ahead so you just place all your chips and hope for the best
Your math is a bit off. As per the article, estimated earnings for 2024 are about -5 billion, so P/E should be around -30. This is actually fairly typical for hot startups like WeWork.
A lot of people are claiming that OpenAI has no moat, but so far they are clearly the market leader, and "chatgpt" has become an everyday word for LLMs, similarly to how "google" became an everyday word for search 20 years ago.
Why is Google still printing money on Search 20 years later? Surely at this point the know-how to build a search engine at scale is out there. It is a 2-sided marketplace, first they captured people's habits, then advertiser dollars. It could be that in the end LLM usage will also be ad-driven, in which case this will be captured by OpenAI most likely, similar to the Google case.
Another case. Why is Outlook the market leader for corporate email, even though email protocols are open standards, and there is no shortage of open source alternatives, etc. The reason is bundling of course and various other IT considerations, such as trainig/certs/control/security. Imo we don't really know yet how the LLM space will play out, what will enable (or not) OpenAI to win beyond the first years.
Of course there _were_ cases when the moat wasn't there, or was quickly disappeared, eg. Netscape's business melted away as soon as Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with Windows.
Personally I think OpenAI still has a good 10x growth ahead (eg. 100M paid users for ChatGPT at the $20/mo-ish pricepoint) if they just maintain the current lead on the rest of the pack, and probably the API income can similarly be scaled up. At the slow-moving Retail company I work at, all the execs have been talking about AI for the last 2 years, but we still don't have a single AI feature in production in any of our apps, so we're not yet contributing to OpenAI revenues. But we will soon, as will 1000s of other slow-moving BigCos.
"Futuresearch estimates that their API business actually has ~50% gross margins, and that most of the losses come from operating costs (R&D, etc) and their ChatGPT business, which gives basically unlimited usage for ~$20/month."
I would have assumed there's more profit in the subscriptions than the API. $20 is roughly 2 million output tokens a month through the API. Given the 50% margin they claim, each user would have to be generating 3-4 million output tokens a month for OpenAI to be at a loss. Is that likely? Seems like a lot of words to me.
Google's AdWords business is worth about 10X that of Open AI ($1.5T) and does $250B of revenue. P/S of about 6X. If everyone stops googling and starts talking to ChatGPT instead, and GPU costs continue to fall such that ad-supported ChatGPT becomes feasible, it's not unreasonable to assume that Open AI can grow revenues by 100X from here.
Which assumes that Google will stand still, instead of cannibalizing its own business model.
The numbers look extremely bad if you're expecting OpenAI to take a significant chunk of Google's business. It's a rounding error compared to the numbers search does.
"GPU costs continue to fall" laughable prediction. They need more powerful GPUs not less as time goes by. These companies need monster GPUs with monster clusters that need monster energies. OpenAI is a bankrupt company as of now, their valuation means nothing as long as they keep loosing money as they do now.
LLM subscriptions are such a scam. You’re paying up front $20 to use an LLM when you could just be paying fractions of a penny per use. Majority of users probably do not get their moneys worth by racking up $20 worth of tokens in a month.
I’d really like to see as “pay as you go” gateway for popular LLMs. As Bezos said: “your margin is my opportunity.”
I think the most consumer friendly options would be a pay as you go model or a pay for tiers of use (e.g., $X for 500 queries, $XX for 1000 queries, etc.).
However they really are banking on the idea that people pay a bunch up front and use it fairly minimally. This allows them to make profit on the subscribers to pay for queries by free users. I have no idea where the pricing model will go in the future but it wouldn’t surprise me if pricing models become the primary method for fighting for market share as opposed to the AI’s actual ability.
I'm skeptical of this analysis simply because it doesn't appear to include any revenue from the Microsoft deal. Many corporate customers are using the Azure ChatGPT service rather than OpenAI's API directly. There has to be some accounting for that.
From my understanding the $1 billion referred to as "API" revenue is inclusive of revenue from licensing the model to Microsoft [1]. This adds up given that subscription revenue will be $2.7 billion and total revenue will be $3.7 billion. Bloomberg reported that Azure usage will generate $200 million this year. [2]
What makes you think OpenAI makes any money on people using Microsoft's technology (i.e. Microsoft owns all OpenAI IP up to AGI) running on Microsoft's servers in Microsoft's cloud?
Or another way to look at it, is that everyone and their mother has heard of them, and in 2 years they've only convinced that many people to pony up cash. Plus they have a massive churn problem with people quitting premium after 1-3 months.
The most hyped technology in the history of the mankind only got 11 million users after compulsive and expensive branding and campaigns. Something doesn't add up here.
Hot take is that until we get level 5, we are in a similar place as automotive where humans are pretty bad at sustained supervision and are biologically lazy.
Employers will see too much delegation to flawed models - codebases will swell with ai-slop that eventually seizes the business. Skills will atrophy. Internal comms will be similarly impacted, with flooding of generic memos and strategy docs from people pretending to work dripping with that RLHF sheen.
This kind of analysis misses the fact that they will find other ways to monetize. Given that almost every other major tech company makes billions from ads (not subscriptions or API usage), it seems reasonable to price this into their valuation.
Other tech companies have extremely low marginal costs compared to OpenAI. If you look at a compute intensive product like Twitch you'll see that despite 100s of millions of active users, extensive advertising, multiple subscriptions types (Turbo/individual streamer subs), 10% on bits, and likely lower AWS rates they still have never turned a profit. OpenAI doesn't have to pay out streamers but they also have considerably higher compute costs per ad opportunity than delivering video does.
Interesting splits. I, too, find that the bulk of the money I give OpenAI is for ChatGPT+, and the bulk of the money I give Anthropic is for Sonnet API access. This month I spent more with Anthropic actually. Although, to be fair, I’d like to give OpenAI money for gpto-preview API access, I just don’t have the option.
This is such an interesting new industry —- so many comments here about race to the bottom / commodification, and I tend to think that way too, but in practice, I’m very very often like “Meh, ChatGPT is bad at this, I’ll ask Claude”, or vice-versa. We may actually be entering a world where we have different personalities and strengths in very large frontier models. I don’t think it’s easy to confidently predict where all this goes.
Some people prefer to delude themselves in order to not admit this.
Just yesterday [1], I argued ChatGPT was a strong brand just to be downvoted to the bottom. Lol. Imagine being so blatantly wrong at something you are supposedly a specialist at.
Turns out it's only a 3BnUSD / year brand, two years after its inception. Also, who is "Claude"? [2].
In terms of tech, nothing even comes close to "GPT-4o mini" for the same price/performance.
OpenAI will continue to dominate the market for the next decade, at least.
OpenAI's weird contract with Microsoft, whereby Microsoft has rights to their IP/artifacts up until OpenAI's board unilaterally declares they have achieved "AGI" (meaning whatever they choose it to mean), may come back to haunt them.
Microsoft is living with the possibility of OpenAI cutting them off at any time of their choosing, as well as not being in control of a technology which is becoming increasingly important, and they are feeling it. Microsoft is trying to build their own SOTA model internally, and there is every reason to expect they will succeed - they have the GPUs, money, desire, paranoia and talent required to do it, and as we have seen from many players there is no moat.
So, what happens to OpenAI when (not if), Microsoft end their relationship? How do OpenAI sell their product, other than directly, to what extent does it cut them off from enterprise customers, can they financially handle building their own $100B datacenters if they are forced to?
You seem more focused in being "right" about votes (in this comment, in the other comment, in your profile comment...) than actually engaging the conversations themselves. [1] is about whether they have a strong moat, that's orthogonal to whether those people thought ChatGPT was the dominant product.
I'd agree being the current best, having a lot of revenue, and being the popular origin of generic terms like "GPT" are indeed great examples of being dominant though. Having "a strong moat" means having reasons 5 other companies won't be able to do the same thing in the next 5-10 years and overtake them. History has shown, plenty of times, just being the big brand OG player at the start doesn't provide a big moat in and of itself. If that were the case you'd be talking about how some other company like Google is the dominant player in all things AI right now.
With 3.6B people in the workforce I'd argue there isn't a billion people in need of a computer, not to mention an ai subscription plan. I'm of course assuming most subscriptions for ai are work related.
TwoCent|1 year ago
JeremyNT|1 year ago
People here like to slag on google for being late to the chatbot party, but they've been using ML the entire time and integrating it into various products for ages. I kind of wonder if the only reason they were "behind" was the lawyers were less brazen about the copyright situation.
I agree with the commodity take, and I personally bet on Google eating everybody else's lunch eventually, because there's a lot of other business behind them and they can afford to undercut competitors. They aren't a one trick pony.
serf|1 year ago
did anything good come from wework?
digitaltrees|1 year ago
Commodities can be massive businesses with competitive moats. Oil is a commodity BP and Exxon do just fine financially speaking.
itsoktocry|1 year ago
I'm as cynical as it gets on this forum, as evidenced by my comment history.
But you're comparing these AI companies to WeWork? Really?
WeWork was a real estate company operating in a historically favourable environment (0% interest rates) pretending to be a tech company. They literally rented office space. What do they have in common?
I notice there's a new generation of "grey beard" programmers constantly talking about how "useless" AI is for programming, and they can do everything faster. Meanwhile, there are tons of us out there who are paying $20, $30, $50 per month and upwards for these tool as they are, and wouldn't want to go without. Ever. And we have no idea where it's going to go. Maybe you're missing something?
spwa4|1 year ago
OpenAI: $3.6B revenue - people paying $2.7B for personal subscription (growth rate of 285% per year) - rest is AI
This would mean the latest OpenAI valuation of $156B is a P/E of about 43. For a company growing 285% per year ... that actually doesn't sound horrible. In fact, that's pretty good.
lrae|1 year ago
Also, isn't Microsoft getting paid back 75% of the profits first, up to their investment, so $13 billion and then 49% for another ~100 billion?
fizzbuzz-rs|1 year ago
mrtksn|1 year ago
IMHO the bigger risk is the "AI" ending up not doing that much after all or their R&D not paying off(which is a risk, their SORA is nowhere to be found when Chinese AI companies are having its alternative in production. Maybe OpenAI isn't that far ahead and it's the language barrier that gives that impression? I don't know I don't speak Chinese but things are happening outside of the Anglosphere).
apsec112|1 year ago
loufe|1 year ago
raincole|1 year ago
That being said, $3.6B is quite a lot of revenue, considering it's mostly from a $20/mo subscription model.
malthaus|1 year ago
the only way the valuation is put "in perspective" is if you estimate that we gonna have a race of heavy investments now to get to a point where the models are "good enough" and you no longer need to invest in training new ones, at which point you switch from running a immensely unprofitable business to a immensely profitable one.
the issue is that nobody knows when that will be the case (if ever) and it currently looks like whoever player is best equipped with capital to fund that race will have a winner takes all future ahead so you just place all your chips and hope for the best
mppm|1 year ago
elorant|1 year ago
Maro|1 year ago
Why is Google still printing money on Search 20 years later? Surely at this point the know-how to build a search engine at scale is out there. It is a 2-sided marketplace, first they captured people's habits, then advertiser dollars. It could be that in the end LLM usage will also be ad-driven, in which case this will be captured by OpenAI most likely, similar to the Google case.
Another case. Why is Outlook the market leader for corporate email, even though email protocols are open standards, and there is no shortage of open source alternatives, etc. The reason is bundling of course and various other IT considerations, such as trainig/certs/control/security. Imo we don't really know yet how the LLM space will play out, what will enable (or not) OpenAI to win beyond the first years.
Of course there _were_ cases when the moat wasn't there, or was quickly disappeared, eg. Netscape's business melted away as soon as Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with Windows.
Personally I think OpenAI still has a good 10x growth ahead (eg. 100M paid users for ChatGPT at the $20/mo-ish pricepoint) if they just maintain the current lead on the rest of the pack, and probably the API income can similarly be scaled up. At the slow-moving Retail company I work at, all the execs have been talking about AI for the last 2 years, but we still don't have a single AI feature in production in any of our apps, so we're not yet contributing to OpenAI revenues. But we will soon, as will 1000s of other slow-moving BigCos.
HyprMusic|1 year ago
I would have assumed there's more profit in the subscriptions than the API. $20 is roughly 2 million output tokens a month through the API. Given the 50% margin they claim, each user would have to be generating 3-4 million output tokens a month for OpenAI to be at a loss. Is that likely? Seems like a lot of words to me.
re-thc|1 year ago
Pretty easy when you start having it search websites, documents, code references etc. Before caching, lots of people used up $20 in a day or 2.
akrymski|1 year ago
Which assumes that Google will stand still, instead of cannibalizing its own business model.
__loam|1 year ago
andro_dev|1 year ago
cedws|1 year ago
I’d really like to see as “pay as you go” gateway for popular LLMs. As Bezos said: “your margin is my opportunity.”
perfect-blue|1 year ago
However they really are banking on the idea that people pay a bunch up front and use it fairly minimally. This allows them to make profit on the subscribers to pay for queries by free users. I have no idea where the pricing model will go in the future but it wouldn’t surprise me if pricing models become the primary method for fighting for market share as opposed to the AI’s actual ability.
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
AlanYx|1 year ago
enragedcacti|1 year ago
[1] "[...] with $1 billion coming from other businesses using its technology." https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/27/technology/openai-chatgpt...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-12/openai-do...
tomp|1 year ago
throwaway314155|1 year ago
rimeice|1 year ago
greg_V|1 year ago
andro_dev|1 year ago
itsoktocry|1 year ago
But this is not their main business model.
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
siliconc0w|1 year ago
Employers will see too much delegation to flawed models - codebases will swell with ai-slop that eventually seizes the business. Skills will atrophy. Internal comms will be similarly impacted, with flooding of generic memos and strategy docs from people pretending to work dripping with that RLHF sheen.
mettamage|1 year ago
falcor84|1 year ago
itsoktocry|1 year ago
I mean, start at step 1: can you name 10 companies related to it?
metadat|1 year ago
The investors behind OpenAI's historic $6.6B funding round https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41726370 - Today (2 comments)
OpenAI wants to build 5-gigawatt data centers, nobody could supply that power https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41726970 - Today (3 comments)
Why OpenAI burns through billions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41729038 - Today (0 comments, informative article)
OpenAI's bankruptcy flames linger on as Apple wiggles out of $6.5B funding round https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41726224 - Today (0 comments, informative article)
OpenAI is now valued at $157B https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41727947 - Today (0 comments, informative article)
nojs|1 year ago
enragedcacti|1 year ago
vessenes|1 year ago
This is such an interesting new industry —- so many comments here about race to the bottom / commodification, and I tend to think that way too, but in practice, I’m very very often like “Meh, ChatGPT is bad at this, I’ll ask Claude”, or vice-versa. We may actually be entering a world where we have different personalities and strengths in very large frontier models. I don’t think it’s easy to confidently predict where all this goes.
moralestapia|1 year ago
Some people prefer to delude themselves in order to not admit this.
Just yesterday [1], I argued ChatGPT was a strong brand just to be downvoted to the bottom. Lol. Imagine being so blatantly wrong at something you are supposedly a specialist at.
Turns out it's only a 3BnUSD / year brand, two years after its inception. Also, who is "Claude"? [2].
In terms of tech, nothing even comes close to "GPT-4o mini" for the same price/performance.
OpenAI will continue to dominate the market for the next decade, at least.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41723208
2: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%201-d&geo=...
HarHarVeryFunny|1 year ago
Microsoft is living with the possibility of OpenAI cutting them off at any time of their choosing, as well as not being in control of a technology which is becoming increasingly important, and they are feeling it. Microsoft is trying to build their own SOTA model internally, and there is every reason to expect they will succeed - they have the GPUs, money, desire, paranoia and talent required to do it, and as we have seen from many players there is no moat.
So, what happens to OpenAI when (not if), Microsoft end their relationship? How do OpenAI sell their product, other than directly, to what extent does it cut them off from enterprise customers, can they financially handle building their own $100B datacenters if they are forced to?
zamadatix|1 year ago
I'd agree being the current best, having a lot of revenue, and being the popular origin of generic terms like "GPT" are indeed great examples of being dominant though. Having "a strong moat" means having reasons 5 other companies won't be able to do the same thing in the next 5-10 years and overtake them. History has shown, plenty of times, just being the big brand OG player at the start doesn't provide a big moat in and of itself. If that were the case you'd be talking about how some other company like Google is the dominant player in all things AI right now.
kwikiel|1 year ago
That’s $0.5 trillion revenue rate
lewhoo|1 year ago
patrickmcnamara|1 year ago