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Idk. OpenAI has 800M weekly active users, which puts it in the top, like, four most used software systems in the west. They also just stated that they're emitti

by 827a 1y ago

Idk. OpenAI has 800M weekly active users, which puts it in the top, like, four most used software systems in the west. They also just stated that they're emitting 6B API tokens per minute, which depending on the model puts their annualized API revenue between $1B-$31B. They have as many active eyeballs as a typical Meta property, and Meta's annualized revenue is ~$150B; but OAI hasn't monetized them yet. They will. And they have API revenue, and they have further advancements in white collar automation tooling, and they have, well, AGImaybe. Its also super clear that this is a technology that most of Big Tech totally missed and seems unable to catch up on (Apple, Amazon, Microsoft; Google is doing fine). There's a seriously possible Microsoft-vs-IBM-v2 play possible in the next couple years. I'm a cynic, but I'm not convinced this is a bubble in the traditional sense. I'd argue that its startlingly asinine to point at a product that went from nothing to being used by 10% of the planetary population in two years, accidentally, like they internally thought it was a stupid idea and still think its a stupid idea, and say "nah they got nothing".

typpilol 1y ago
Especially when you see Bitcoin and how their adoption rate is Crypto was / is a true bubble Lots of paper value but hardly any adoption
- beeflet 1y ago
  Bitcoin's adoption rate was hampered by the block size wars in 2017 when companies started dropping it as a payment method. So I don't think its adoption rate is a good model of anything because it is so affected by bitcoin's technical features and politics of development.
- tim333 1y ago
  I use crypto for speculation/gambling. It may not be a noble use but the market for that is huge. Las Vegas and Wall Street have been around for a while. Some iffy figures are maybe 560 million holders globally and about 28% of Americans including of course the president and family. Trading volume in the last 24 hours was $1.37tn which is a lot for something with hardly any adoption. The Bitcoin bubble of course crashed in 2013 from $1k, 2018 from $19k, 2021 from $65k and has just fallen to $111k and will probably crash further.
echelon 1y ago
OpenAI just minted a brand new Mag 7 in under 10 years. Almost every other AI company is collecting scraps. Sora is one of the fastest growing apps in history. When they add ads to ChatGPT, they'll make bank. I use ChatGPT way more than I use Google now.
- prescriptivist 1y ago
  OpenAI's (and other superscalers) revenue isn't really up for debate, nor is the long term value of their mission/product. The issue (somewhat articulated in this article) is that the superscalers (both public and private) have generated such a massive, unprecedented amount of speculative investment as well as capital expenditure that has left the rest of the economy in the dust (aka minting a mag 7 in less than a decade) that we have a distorted view of the world. The fear of an AI bubble isn't that AI companies will fail, it's that a downturn in the AI "bubble" will lay bare the underlying bear market that their growth is occluding. What happens then? Nobody knows. Probably nothing good. Personally I think much of the stock market growth in the last few years that seems disconnected with previous trends (see parallel growth betwen gold and equities) is based on retail volume and unorthodox retail patterns (Robinhood, WSB, et. al) that I think conventional historical market analysis is completely unprepared for. At this point everything may go to the moon forever, or it may collapse completely. Either way, we live in a time of little precedence.
  - beeflet 1y ago
    >OpenAI's (and other superscalers) revenue isn't really up for debate It isn't? What is stopping companies from building on GPT-OSS or other local models for cheaper? The AI services have no moat. I agree with your second paragraph. The boom in the AI market is occluding a general bear market.
    - prescriptivist 1y ago
      > It isn't? What is stopping companies from building on GPT-OSS or other local models for cheaper? The AI services have no moat. Right now there is an efficiency/hardware moat. That's why the Stargate in Abilene and corresponding build outs in Louisiana and elsewhere are some of the most intense capex projects from the private sector ever. Hardware and electric production is the name of the game right now. This Odd Lots podcast is really fresh and relevant to this conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsqn2XJDcwM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsqn2XJDcwM Local models, local agents, local everything and the commodification of LLMs, at least for software eng is inevitable IMO, but there is a lot of tooling that hasn't yet been built for that commodified experience yet. For companies rapidly looking to pivot to AI force multiplication, the superscalers are the answer for now. I think it's a highly inefficient approach for technical orgs, but time will create efficiency. For your joe on the street feeding data into an LLM, then I don't think any of those orgs (think your local city hall, or state DMV) are going to run local models. So there is a captured market to some degree for the the current superscalars.
bgwalter 1y ago
Angry Birds had at least 2 billion downloads and 250M users who created accounts: https://www.pcmag.com/news/angry-birds-shares-your-data-far-and-wide https://www.pcmag.com/news/angry-birds-shares-your-data-far-... I suppose the game should be valued at $200 billion.
- 827a 1y ago
  250M all-time users in a mobile game versus 800M weekly active users with scary native advertising possibility, is at least a two orders of magnitude, maybe three, difference in monetization. The better comparison is Fortnite & Epic Games, which has ~1.5M concurrent players [1] and commands an estimated valuation of ~$18B [2]. You can also look at Meta, which runs platforms materially similar to OpenAI, with user counts within the same order of magnitude, and they command a valuation of ~$1.7T. [1] https://www.playerauctions.com/player-count/fortnite/ https://www.playerauctions.com/player-count/fortnite/ [2] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/private-companies/highest-valuation/ https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/private-companies/highest-...
  - bgwalter 1y ago
    "Open" "AI" defines a weekly user as someone who has used the service one time in a week. 250M for Angry Birds is not all time users. They had 260 million monthly active players: https://yourstory.com/2025/02/rise-fall-angry-birds https://yourstory.com/2025/02/rise-fall-angry-birds Who got bored later, as is the case for "AI" already now. I agree though that monetization of people entering their private data is much more promising for a company with ex-NSA directors on the board. Still, I believe that "Open" "AI" is completely overvalued.
random9749832 1y ago
The extreme majority are not plus users. Most people do not care whether they are using GPT-5 or GPT-5 mini because most users are just people who want something like a holiday itinerary or a gift idea. You live in a bubble that's why you can't see it.

by 827a 1y ago

typpilol 1y ago

Especially when you see Bitcoin and how their adoption rate is Crypto was / is a true bubble Lots of paper value but hardly any adoption

beeflet 1y ago
Bitcoin's adoption rate was hampered by the block size wars in 2017 when companies started dropping it as a payment method. So I don't think its adoption rate is a good model of anything because it is so affected by bitcoin's technical features and politics of development.
tim333 1y ago
I use crypto for speculation/gambling. It may not be a noble use but the market for that is huge. Las Vegas and Wall Street have been around for a while. Some iffy figures are maybe 560 million holders globally and about 28% of Americans including of course the president and family. Trading volume in the last 24 hours was $1.37tn which is a lot for something with hardly any adoption. The Bitcoin bubble of course crashed in 2013 from $1k, 2018 from $19k, 2021 from $65k and has just fallen to $111k and will probably crash further.

echelon 1y ago

OpenAI just minted a brand new Mag 7 in under 10 years. Almost every other AI company is collecting scraps. Sora is one of the fastest growing apps in history. When they add ads to ChatGPT, they'll make bank. I use ChatGPT way more than I use Google now.

prescriptivist 1y ago
OpenAI's (and other superscalers) revenue isn't really up for debate, nor is the long term value of their mission/product. The issue (somewhat articulated in this article) is that the superscalers (both public and private) have generated such a massive, unprecedented amount of speculative investment as well as capital expenditure that has left the rest of the economy in the dust (aka minting a mag 7 in less than a decade) that we have a distorted view of the world. The fear of an AI bubble isn't that AI companies will fail, it's that a downturn in the AI "bubble" will lay bare the underlying bear market that their growth is occluding. What happens then? Nobody knows. Probably nothing good. Personally I think much of the stock market growth in the last few years that seems disconnected with previous trends (see parallel growth betwen gold and equities) is based on retail volume and unorthodox retail patterns (Robinhood, WSB, et. al) that I think conventional historical market analysis is completely unprepared for. At this point everything may go to the moon forever, or it may collapse completely. Either way, we live in a time of little precedence.
- beeflet 1y ago
  >OpenAI's (and other superscalers) revenue isn't really up for debate It isn't? What is stopping companies from building on GPT-OSS or other local models for cheaper? The AI services have no moat. I agree with your second paragraph. The boom in the AI market is occluding a general bear market.
  - prescriptivist 1y ago
    > It isn't? What is stopping companies from building on GPT-OSS or other local models for cheaper? The AI services have no moat. Right now there is an efficiency/hardware moat. That's why the Stargate in Abilene and corresponding build outs in Louisiana and elsewhere are some of the most intense capex projects from the private sector ever. Hardware and electric production is the name of the game right now. This Odd Lots podcast is really fresh and relevant to this conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsqn2XJDcwM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsqn2XJDcwM Local models, local agents, local everything and the commodification of LLMs, at least for software eng is inevitable IMO, but there is a lot of tooling that hasn't yet been built for that commodified experience yet. For companies rapidly looking to pivot to AI force multiplication, the superscalers are the answer for now. I think it's a highly inefficient approach for technical orgs, but time will create efficiency. For your joe on the street feeding data into an LLM, then I don't think any of those orgs (think your local city hall, or state DMV) are going to run local models. So there is a captured market to some degree for the the current superscalars.

bgwalter 1y ago

Angry Birds had at least 2 billion downloads and 250M users who created accounts: https://www.pcmag.com/news/angry-birds-shares-your-data-far-and-wide https://www.pcmag.com/news/angry-birds-shares-your-data-far-... I suppose the game should be valued at $200 billion.

827a 1y ago
250M all-time users in a mobile game versus 800M weekly active users with scary native advertising possibility, is at least a two orders of magnitude, maybe three, difference in monetization. The better comparison is Fortnite & Epic Games, which has ~1.5M concurrent players [1] and commands an estimated valuation of ~$18B [2]. You can also look at Meta, which runs platforms materially similar to OpenAI, with user counts within the same order of magnitude, and they command a valuation of ~$1.7T. [1] https://www.playerauctions.com/player-count/fortnite/ https://www.playerauctions.com/player-count/fortnite/ [2] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/private-companies/highest-valuation/ https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/private-companies/highest-...
- bgwalter 1y ago
  "Open" "AI" defines a weekly user as someone who has used the service one time in a week. 250M for Angry Birds is not all time users. They had 260 million monthly active players: https://yourstory.com/2025/02/rise-fall-angry-birds https://yourstory.com/2025/02/rise-fall-angry-birds Who got bored later, as is the case for "AI" already now. I agree though that monetization of people entering their private data is much more promising for a company with ex-NSA directors on the board. Still, I believe that "Open" "AI" is completely overvalued.

random9749832 1y ago

The extreme majority are not plus users. Most people do not care whether they are using GPT-5 or GPT-5 mini because most users are just people who want something like a holiday itinerary or a gift idea. You live in a bubble that's why you can't see it.