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How OpenAI uses complex and circular deals to fuel its multibillion-dollar rise

(www.nytimes.com)
387 points reaperducer | 3 comments | 31 Oct 25 13:03 UTC | HN request time: 0.478s | source
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nova22033 ◴[31 Oct 25 14:59 UTC] No.45772702[source]▶
Related

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/29/microsoft_earnings_q1...

Microsoft seemingly just revealed that OpenAI lost $11.5B last quarter

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guywithahat ◴[31 Oct 25 15:07 UTC] No.45772839[source]▶
It's incredible how Tesla used to lose a few hundred million a year and analysis shows would freak out claiming they'd never be profitable. Now Rivian can lose 5 billion a year and I don't hear anything about it, and OpenAI can lose 11 billion in a quarter and Microsoft still backs them.

I do think this is going to be a deeply profitable industry, but this feels a little like the WeWork CEO flying couches to offices in private jets

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randomNumber7 ◴[31 Oct 25 15:10 UTC] No.45772879[source]▶
The winner takes it all, so it is reasonable to bet big to be the one.
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anonymousiam ◴[31 Oct 25 15:16 UTC] No.45772975[source]▶
The one what? What is the secret sauce that will distinguish one LLM from another? Is it patentable? What's going to prevent all of the free LLMs from winning the prize? An AI crash seems inevitable.
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schnitzelstoat ◴[31 Oct 25 15:24 UTC] No.45773079[source]▶
It could end up like Search did, at first you had Lycos, AskJeeves, Altavista etc. and then Google became absolutely dominant.

They want to be the Google in this scenario.

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camdenreslink ◴[31 Oct 25 16:32 UTC] No.45773910[source]▶
Google was by far the best product. Maybe an LLM provider will emerge in that way, but it seems they are all very similar in capability right now.
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1. wyre ◴[31 Oct 25 16:48 UTC] No.45774076[source]▶
I don't believe google won the search engine wars because they had the best product, while it may be true, the won because the of the tools they provided to their users. Email, cloud storage, docs/sheets/drive, Chrome, etc
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2. ncls ◴[31 Oct 25 17:01 UTC] No.45774210[source]▶
They were already pretty dominant in search by the time they released most if not all of those. They got into that position by being the better search engine - better results and nicer to use (clean design, faster loading times).
3. camdenreslink ◴[01 Nov 25 20:52 UTC] No.45785238[source]▶
They had already won the search engine wars well before any of those additional products existed.