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- Hacker News
- What is the end goal? GPT-5 wasn't even a step up from o3.
ChatGPT has 800 million weekly users but only 10 million are paying.
- Doesn’t this mean that some percentage of Microsoft’s investment is being given directly to their competitor? This feels like a bubble moment.by fathermarz
- They sure seem to be writing a lot of cheques. Hope they all cash ok because if they don’t it’ll suck the entire tech industry down with itby Havoc
- And so the bubble grows.
I'd be happy if the industry/stock market proves me wrong, but I can't see this ending any other way than with a major crash that makes the dot-com boom seem like a minor blimp.
by Insanity - https://founderboat.com/interviews/2025-11-01-openai-sam-sat...
> A central theme of the discussion was the staggering demand for computational power. Gerstner highlighted OpenAI’s reported commitment of $1.4 trillion for compute over the next five years, questioning how a company with reported revenues of $13 billion could manage such an outlay.
> Altman pushed back forcefully. “First of all, we’re doing well more revenue than that. Second of all, Brad, if you want to sell your shares, I’ll find you a buyer,” he quipped. He expressed profound confidence in the company’s trajectory. “We do plan for revenue to grow steeply. Revenue is growing steeply. We are taking a forward bet that it’s going to continue to grow.”
This seems to be just the tip of the iceberg; what about the rest?
by chaosprint - The main question I have with all of these deals: how much of the deal is OpenAI actually required to buy, versus how much of it is an option for OpenAI to buy? Because if you tot up all of these numbers, it's something like 10× current annual revenue that OpenAI is signing deals for, and if OpenAI is actually committing to all of that spend... there is a serious cash crunch looming. But if OpenAI is merely optioning to spend up to that much, and only has to commit to a tenth of those numbers, well, that's not as threatening to OpenAI as a going concern.by jcranmer
- OpenAI is generating $13B a year in revenue. Let’s be generous and say $20B. They’ve signed commitments to spend something like $1.4 trillion on compute. An asset that to date has proven to have a hyper-depreciation cycle.
Someone has to come up with $1.4 trillion in actual cash, fast, or this whole thing comes crashing down. Why? At the end of all this circular financing and deals are folks that actually want real cash (eg electricity utilities that aren’t going to accept OpenAI shares for payment).
If the above doesn’t freak you about a bit at how bonkers this whole thing has become then you need a reality check. “Selling ads” on ChatGPT ain’t gonna close that hole.
by JCM9 - by weeeeelp