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OpenAI is basically just Netscape at this point. An innovative product with no means of significant revenue generation. One one side it's up against large comp

OpenAI is basically just Netscape at this point. An innovative product with no means of significant revenue generation. One one side it's up against large competitors with an already established user base and product line that can simply bundle their AI offerings into those products. Google will do just what Microsoft did with Internet Explorer and bundle Gemini in for 'Free' with their already other profitable products and established ad-funded revenue streams. At the same time, Deepseek/Qwen, etc. are open sourcing stuff to undercut them on the other side. It's a classic squeeze on their already fairly dubious business model.

ascorbic 10mo ago
> An innovative product with no means of significant revenue generation. OpenAI has annualized revenue of $20bn. That's not Google, but it's not insignificant.
- cheald 10mo ago
  And a $115b burn rate. They're toast if they can't figure out how to stay on top.
  - nfRfqX5n 10mo ago
    Could say that about any AI company that isn’t at the top as well
    - hbn 10mo ago
      Google and Microsoft have existing major money printing businesses to keep their AI business afloat and burn money for a while. That's how Microsoft broke into gaming (and then squandered it years later for unrelated incompetence) OpenAI doesn't have that.
    - elAhmo 10mo ago
      You can say it about the AI companies, but Google or Microsoft are far from AI companies.
      - tartoran 10mo ago
        That's a good point. Google was sleeping on AI and wasn't able to come up with a product before OpenAI and they only scrambled to come out with something when OpenAi became all the rage. Big companies are hard to budge and move in a new direction.
- echelon 10mo ago
  Every F500 CEO told their team "have an AI strategy ASAP". In a year, when the economy might be in worse shape, they'll ask their team if the AI thing is working out. What do you think happens to all the enterprise OpenAI contracts at that point? (Especially if the same tech layperson CEOs keep reading Forbes and hearing Scott Galloway dump on OpenAI and call the AI thing a "bubble"?)
  - riku_iki 10mo ago
    > What do you think happens to all the enterprise OpenAI contracts at that point? they will go to google if it wins the AI race.
  - raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
    I will change a few lines of code and use another AI model?
    - echelon 10mo ago
      Are all of their sales their code gen model? And isn't there a lot of competition in the code gen space from Google and Anthropic? I'd imagine they sold these to enterprise: https://openai.com/business/ https://openai.com/business/ "ChatGPT for Business", sold per seat "API Platform" I could see the former getting canned if AI isn't adding value. Developers can change the models they use frequently, especially with third party infrastructure like OpenRouter or FAL.
    - bangaladore 10mo ago
      Yeah- given all top AI models are more and more generalists, as time goes on there is less and less reason to use one over another.
      - raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
        It’s really even easier than that. I already do all my work on AWS and use Bedrock that hosts every popular model and its own except for OpenAIs closed source models. I have a reusable library that lets me choose between any of the models I choose to support or any new model in the same family that uses the same request format. Every project I’ve done, it’s a simple matter of changing a config setting and choosing a different model. If the model provider goes out of business, it’s not like the model is going to disappear from AWS the next day.
- cmiles8 10mo ago
  We live in crazy times, but given what they’ve spent and committed to that’s a drop in the bucket relative to what they need to be pulling in. They’re history if they can’t pump up the revenue much much faster. Given that we’re likely at peak AI hype at the moment they’re not well positioned at all to survive the coming “trough of disillusionment” that happens like clockwork on every hype cycle. Google, by comparison, is very well positioned to weather a coming storm.
  - XorNot 10mo ago
    Google survives because I still Google things, and the phone I'm typing this on is a Google product. Whereas I haven't opened the ChatFPT bookmark in months and will probably delete it now that I think about it.
    - scrollop 10mo ago
      RIP privacy. Hello Stasi Google and its full personalised file on XorNot. Google knows when you're about to sneeze.
- Spooky23 10mo ago
  Google is embedding Gemini into Chrome Developer Tools. You can ask for an analysis of individual network calls in your browser by clicking a checkbox. That's just an example of the power of platform. They seem to be better at integration than Microsoft. OpenAI has this amazing technology and a great app, but the company feels like some sort of financial engineering nightmare.
  - cruffle_duffle 10mo ago
    To be fair the CEO of OpenAI is also a crypto bro. Financial engineering is right up their wheelhouse.
- ethin 10mo ago
  It is insignificant when they're spending more than $115bn to offer their service. And yes, I say "more than," not because I have any inside knowledge but because I'm pretty sure $115bn is a "kind" estimate and the expenditure is probably higher. But either way, they're running at a loss. And for a company like them, that loss is huge. Google could take the loss as could Microsoft or Amazon because they have lots of other revenue sources. OAI does not.
woopwoop 10mo ago
Maybe? But you could have written this same thing in 1999 with OpenAI and Google replaced by Google and Yahoo, respectively.
- wat10000 10mo ago
  Google in 1999 was already far superior to Yahoo and other competitors. I don't think OpenAI is in a similar position there. It seems debatable as to whether they're even the best, let alone a massive leap ahead of everyone else the way Google was.
  - ur-whale 10mo ago
    Agree. And GOOG is not a one trick poney any more, by far, especially when it comes to revenue. Can't say the same of OpenAI
  - Libidinalecon 10mo ago
    Google was better but it wasn't far superior to AltaVista is what I remember. Yahoo was always more a directory of websites. AltaVista was better than Lycos or Yahoo but then Google was faster, gave better results than AltaVista and the very minimal UI was something interesting. I quite liked AltaVista but I never went back to it after using Google either. I might even say Gemini 3 is better than GPT5 than what Google was to AltaVista. GPT5 feels rather useless to me after my time now with Gemini.
    - fragmede 10mo ago
      > Google was better but it wasn't far superior to AltaVista is what I remember. Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but I remember it being significantly better. Alta Vista, you'd have to dig into page 8 before getting to the good stuff. History is written by the victors, as they say, but I remember Google search results being significantly better than Altavista. It wouldn't be until two decades later that I got to work there though.
    - wat10000 10mo ago
      As I remember it (I was just starting college at the time), Google search was an absolute revelation. You could type in a search term and the first hit would usually be what you wanted. AltaVista required a lot of looking through results to find the right thing and messing around with boolean operators. People switched over and never looked back. Google went from zero to a substantial majority market share in only about one year.
edouard-harris 10mo ago
> with no means of significant revenue generation. OpenAI will top $20 billion in ARR this year, which certainly seems like significant revenue generation. [1] [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/sam-altman-says-openai-will-top-20-billion-annual-revenue-this-year.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/sam-altman-says-openai-will-...
- stack_framer 10mo ago
  I can generate $20 billion in ARR this year too! I just need you to give me $100 billion and allow me to sell each of your dollars for 0.2 dollars.
  - bgirard 10mo ago
    It's a fun trope to repeat but that's not what OpenAI is doing. I get a ton of value from ChatGPT and Codex from my subscription. As long as the inference is not done at a lost this analogy doesn't hold. They're not paying me to use it. They are generating output that is very valuable to me. Much more than my subscription cost. I've been able to help setup cross app automation for my partner's business, remodel my house, plan a trip of Japan and assist with the cultural barrier, vibe code apps, technical support and so much more.
    - ReptileMan 10mo ago
      >. As long as the inference is not done at a lost this analogy doesn't hold. I think that there were some article here that claimed that even inference is done at loss - and talking about per subscriber. I think it was for their 200$ subscription. In a way we will be in a deal with it situation soon where they will just impose metered models and not subscription.
    - mirthflat83 10mo ago
      Well, don't you think you're getting a ton of value because they're selling each of their dollars for 0.2 dollars?
    - munk-a 10mo ago
searls 10mo ago
It would be funny if OpenAI turns for-profit, faceplants, and then finds new life (as Mozilla did) as a non-profit sharing its tools for free.
- felixfurtak 10mo ago
  This is pretty much all that OpenAI is at the moment. Mozilla is a non-profit that is only sustained by the generous wealthy benefactor (Google) to give the illusion that there is competition in the browser market. OpenAI is a non-profit funded by a generous wealthy benefactor (Microsoft). Ideas of IPO and profitability are all just pipe dreams in Altmans imagination.
  - elAhmo 10mo ago
    > Mozilla is a non-profit that is only sustained by the generous wealthy benefactor (Google) to give the illusion that there is competition in the browser market. Good way of phrasing things. Kinda sad to read this, I tried to react with 'wait there is competition in the browser market', but it is not a great argument to make - without money for using Google as a default search engine, Mozilla would effectively collapse.
    - chii 10mo ago
      > Mozilla would effectively collapse. given how bloated it (the org) is, i think that may be a good thing. Return firefox to good old community contributions, and donations from users.
      - blackenedgem 10mo ago
        The main issue there is you need someway to pay the engineers in that transitional period the moment Mozilla collapses. Otherwise they leave, find new jobs, and you lose all the expertise and knowledge of the codebase.
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
dragonwriter 10mo ago
> Google will do just what Microsoft did with Internet Explorer and bundle Gemini in for 'Free' with their already other profitable products and established ad-funded revenue streams. “will do”? Is there any Google product they haven't done that with already?
bibimsz 10mo ago
anecdotal, but my wife wasn't interested in switching to claude from chatgpt. as far as she's concerned chatgpt knows her, and she's got her assistant perfectly tuned to her liking.
- munchler 10mo ago
  ChatGPT is to AI as Facebook is to social media. OpenAI captured a significant number of users due to first-mover advantage, but that advantage is long gone now.
  - felixfurtak 10mo ago
    And Facebook only makes money because it is essentially just an advertising platform. Same with Google. It's fundametally just ads. The only way OpenAI can survive is to replicate this model. But it probably doesn't have the traffic to pull it off unless it can differentiate itself from the already crowded competition.
    - wavemode 10mo ago
      Ads make sense in an AI search engine product like Perplexity. ChatGPT could try to make a UI like that. But the thing is, the world already has an AI search engine. It's called Google, and it's already heavily integrated with Gemini. Why would people switch?
  - jimbokun 10mo ago
    1. ChatGPT would be MySpace as the first mover. 2. Facebook has insane lock in: your entire graph of friends and family.
- tofuahdude 10mo ago
  Same situation over here. Multiple family members only know chatgpt / think that chatgpt knows them and have never heard of the competitors.
  - 10mo ago
jmyeet 10mo ago
Oh God I love the analogy of OpenAI being Netscape. As someone who was an adult in the 1990s, this is so apt. Companies at that time were trying to build a moat around the World Wide Web. They obviously failed. I've thought that OpenAI too would fail but I've never thought about it like Netscape and WWW. OpenAI should be looking at how Google built a moat around search. Anyone can write a Web crawler. Lots of people have. But no one else has turned search into the money printing machine that Google has. And they've used that to fund their search advantage. I've long thought the moat-buster here will be China because they simply won't want the US to own this future. It's a national security issue. I see things like DeepSeek is moat-busting activity and I expect that to intensify. Currently China can't buy the latest NVidia chips or ASML lithography equipment. Why? Because the US said so. I don't expect China to tolerate this long term and of any country, China has desmonstrated the long-term commitment to this kind of project.
asdfman123 10mo ago
I know it's been said before but it's slightly insane they're trying to compete on a hot new tech with a company with 1) a top notch reputation for AI and 2) the largest money printer that has ever existed on the planet. Feel like the end result would always be that while Google is slow to adjust, once they're in the race they're in it it.
- margorczynski 10mo ago
  The problem for Google is that there is no sensible way to monetize this tech and it undercuts their main money source which is search. On top of that the Chinese seem to be hellbent to destroy any possible moat the US companies might create by flooding the market with SOTA open-source models. Although this tech might be good for software companies in general - it does reduce the main cost they have which is personnel. But in the long run Google will need to reinvent itself or die.
  - kelipso 10mo ago
    Gemini has been in Google search for a while now. I use it somewhat often when I search for something and want follow up questions. I don’t see any ads in Gemini but maybe I would see it if I search for ads relevant things idk. But I definitely use google search more often because Gemini is there and probably that goes for a lot of people.
  - golfer 10mo ago
    Ads are already appearing in Google search AI overviews [1]. AI overviews have 2 billion users at the moment. [1] https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/16297775?hl=en https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/16297775?hl=en
TacticalCoder 10mo ago
> Google will do just what Microsoft did with Internet Explorer and bundle Gemini in for 'Free' with their already other profitable products and established ad-funded revenue streams. Just some numbers to show what OpenAI is against: GMail users: nearing 2 billion Youtube MAU: 2.5 billion active Android devices: 4 billion (!) Market cap: 3.8 trillion (at a P/E of 31) So on one side you've got this behemoth with, compared to OpenAI's size, unlimited funding. The $25 bn per year OpenAI is after is basically a parking ticket for Google (only slightly exaggerating). Behemoth who came with Gemini 3 Pro "thinking" and Nano Banana (that name though) who are SOTA. And on the other side you've got the open-source weights you mentioned. When OpenAI had its big moment HN was full of comments about how it was game over for Google for search was done for. Three years later and the best (arguably the best) model gives the best answer when you search... Using Google search. Funny how these things turns out. Google is atm the 3rd biggest cap in the world: only Apple and NVidia are slightly ahead. If Google is serious about its AI chips (and it looks like they are) and see the fuck-ups over fuck-ups by Apple, I wouldn't be surprised at all if Alphabet was to regain the number one spot. That's the company OpenAI is fighting: a company that's already been the biggest cap in the entire world and that's probably going to regain that spot rather sooner than later and that happens to have crushed every single AI benchmark when Gemini 3 Pro came out. I had a ChatGPT subscription. Now I'm using Gemini 3 Pro.
- redwood 10mo ago
  You just made it clear who needs to acquire openai.. it's going to be Apple! (Jonny Ive already there). And great points on the Google history.. let's not forget they wrote the original Transformers paper after all
  - adgjlsfhk1 10mo ago
    the branding is all wrong. I could see Apple buying anthropic, but OpenAI is exactly the wrong ai company for Apple. openai is the tacky, slop based ai company. their main value is the brand and the users, but Apple already has a strong brand and billions of users. Apple needs an ai company with deployment experience and a good model, but paying for a brand and users doesn't make sense for them.
mips_avatar 10mo ago
Gemini can't be bundled for free unless they figure out how to make gemini flash 3.0 significantly cheaper to inference than 2.5
- HDThoreaun 10mo ago
  It can be bundled for "free" if they raise the price of google workspace. LLMs are right now most valuable as an enterprise productivity software assistant. Very useful to have a full suite of enterprise productivity software in order to sell them.
- whywhywhywhy 10mo ago
  Or put ads in it
vondur 10mo ago
I don't think the Government would let them fail, so long as the specter of the Chinese becoming dominant in AI is a thing.
dbspin 10mo ago
Literally got an email this morning from Google, to say my Google One plan now 'includes AI benefits' - including "More access to Gemini 3 Pro, our most capable model More access to Deep Research in the Gemini app Video generation with limited access to Veo 3.1 Fast in the Gemini app More access to image generation with Nano Banana Pro Additional AI credits for video generation in Flow and Whisk Access Gemini directly in Google apps like Gmail and Docs" [Thanks but no thanks]
vachina 10mo ago
OpenAI has tons of funnels for their products. Azure’s AI smoke and mirrors offerings uses openAI behind the scenes, big with enterprise users (who has a lot of money)

ascorbic 10mo ago

> An innovative product with no means of significant revenue generation. OpenAI has annualized revenue of $20bn. That's not Google, but it's not insignificant.

cheald 10mo ago
And a $115b burn rate. They're toast if they can't figure out how to stay on top.
- nfRfqX5n 10mo ago
  Could say that about any AI company that isn’t at the top as well
  - hbn 10mo ago
    Google and Microsoft have existing major money printing businesses to keep their AI business afloat and burn money for a while. That's how Microsoft broke into gaming (and then squandered it years later for unrelated incompetence) OpenAI doesn't have that.
  - elAhmo 10mo ago
    You can say it about the AI companies, but Google or Microsoft are far from AI companies.
    - tartoran 10mo ago
      That's a good point. Google was sleeping on AI and wasn't able to come up with a product before OpenAI and they only scrambled to come out with something when OpenAi became all the rage. Big companies are hard to budge and move in a new direction.
echelon 10mo ago
Every F500 CEO told their team "have an AI strategy ASAP". In a year, when the economy might be in worse shape, they'll ask their team if the AI thing is working out. What do you think happens to all the enterprise OpenAI contracts at that point? (Especially if the same tech layperson CEOs keep reading Forbes and hearing Scott Galloway dump on OpenAI and call the AI thing a "bubble"?)
- riku_iki 10mo ago
  > What do you think happens to all the enterprise OpenAI contracts at that point? they will go to google if it wins the AI race.
- raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
  I will change a few lines of code and use another AI model?
  - echelon 10mo ago
    Are all of their sales their code gen model? And isn't there a lot of competition in the code gen space from Google and Anthropic? I'd imagine they sold these to enterprise: https://openai.com/business/ https://openai.com/business/ "ChatGPT for Business", sold per seat "API Platform" I could see the former getting canned if AI isn't adding value. Developers can change the models they use frequently, especially with third party infrastructure like OpenRouter or FAL.
  - bangaladore 10mo ago
    Yeah- given all top AI models are more and more generalists, as time goes on there is less and less reason to use one over another.
    - raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
      It’s really even easier than that. I already do all my work on AWS and use Bedrock that hosts every popular model and its own except for OpenAIs closed source models. I have a reusable library that lets me choose between any of the models I choose to support or any new model in the same family that uses the same request format. Every project I’ve done, it’s a simple matter of changing a config setting and choosing a different model. If the model provider goes out of business, it’s not like the model is going to disappear from AWS the next day.
cmiles8 10mo ago
We live in crazy times, but given what they’ve spent and committed to that’s a drop in the bucket relative to what they need to be pulling in. They’re history if they can’t pump up the revenue much much faster. Given that we’re likely at peak AI hype at the moment they’re not well positioned at all to survive the coming “trough of disillusionment” that happens like clockwork on every hype cycle. Google, by comparison, is very well positioned to weather a coming storm.
- XorNot 10mo ago
  Google survives because I still Google things, and the phone I'm typing this on is a Google product. Whereas I haven't opened the ChatFPT bookmark in months and will probably delete it now that I think about it.
  - scrollop 10mo ago
    RIP privacy. Hello Stasi Google and its full personalised file on XorNot. Google knows when you're about to sneeze.
Spooky23 10mo ago
Google is embedding Gemini into Chrome Developer Tools. You can ask for an analysis of individual network calls in your browser by clicking a checkbox. That's just an example of the power of platform. They seem to be better at integration than Microsoft. OpenAI has this amazing technology and a great app, but the company feels like some sort of financial engineering nightmare.
- cruffle_duffle 10mo ago
  To be fair the CEO of OpenAI is also a crypto bro. Financial engineering is right up their wheelhouse.
ethin 10mo ago
It is insignificant when they're spending more than $115bn to offer their service. And yes, I say "more than," not because I have any inside knowledge but because I'm pretty sure $115bn is a "kind" estimate and the expenditure is probably higher. But either way, they're running at a loss. And for a company like them, that loss is huge. Google could take the loss as could Microsoft or Amazon because they have lots of other revenue sources. OAI does not.

woopwoop 10mo ago

Maybe? But you could have written this same thing in 1999 with OpenAI and Google replaced by Google and Yahoo, respectively.

wat10000 10mo ago
Google in 1999 was already far superior to Yahoo and other competitors. I don't think OpenAI is in a similar position there. It seems debatable as to whether they're even the best, let alone a massive leap ahead of everyone else the way Google was.
- ur-whale 10mo ago
  Agree. And GOOG is not a one trick poney any more, by far, especially when it comes to revenue. Can't say the same of OpenAI
- Libidinalecon 10mo ago
  Google was better but it wasn't far superior to AltaVista is what I remember. Yahoo was always more a directory of websites. AltaVista was better than Lycos or Yahoo but then Google was faster, gave better results than AltaVista and the very minimal UI was something interesting. I quite liked AltaVista but I never went back to it after using Google either. I might even say Gemini 3 is better than GPT5 than what Google was to AltaVista. GPT5 feels rather useless to me after my time now with Gemini.
  - fragmede 10mo ago
    > Google was better but it wasn't far superior to AltaVista is what I remember. Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but I remember it being significantly better. Alta Vista, you'd have to dig into page 8 before getting to the good stuff. History is written by the victors, as they say, but I remember Google search results being significantly better than Altavista. It wouldn't be until two decades later that I got to work there though.
  - wat10000 10mo ago
    As I remember it (I was just starting college at the time), Google search was an absolute revelation. You could type in a search term and the first hit would usually be what you wanted. AltaVista required a lot of looking through results to find the right thing and messing around with boolean operators. People switched over and never looked back. Google went from zero to a substantial majority market share in only about one year.

edouard-harris 10mo ago

> with no means of significant revenue generation. OpenAI will top $20 billion in ARR this year, which certainly seems like significant revenue generation. [1] [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/sam-altman-says-openai-will-top-20-billion-annual-revenue-this-year.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/sam-altman-says-openai-will-...

stack_framer 10mo ago
I can generate $20 billion in ARR this year too! I just need you to give me $100 billion and allow me to sell each of your dollars for 0.2 dollars.
- bgirard 10mo ago
  It's a fun trope to repeat but that's not what OpenAI is doing. I get a ton of value from ChatGPT and Codex from my subscription. As long as the inference is not done at a lost this analogy doesn't hold. They're not paying me to use it. They are generating output that is very valuable to me. Much more than my subscription cost. I've been able to help setup cross app automation for my partner's business, remodel my house, plan a trip of Japan and assist with the cultural barrier, vibe code apps, technical support and so much more.
  - ReptileMan 10mo ago
    >. As long as the inference is not done at a lost this analogy doesn't hold. I think that there were some article here that claimed that even inference is done at loss - and talking about per subscriber. I think it was for their 200$ subscription. In a way we will be in a deal with it situation soon where they will just impose metered models and not subscription.
  - mirthflat83 10mo ago
    Well, don't you think you're getting a ton of value because they're selling each of their dollars for 0.2 dollars?
  - munk-a 10mo ago

searls 10mo ago

It would be funny if OpenAI turns for-profit, faceplants, and then finds new life (as Mozilla did) as a non-profit sharing its tools for free.

felixfurtak 10mo ago
This is pretty much all that OpenAI is at the moment. Mozilla is a non-profit that is only sustained by the generous wealthy benefactor (Google) to give the illusion that there is competition in the browser market. OpenAI is a non-profit funded by a generous wealthy benefactor (Microsoft). Ideas of IPO and profitability are all just pipe dreams in Altmans imagination.
- elAhmo 10mo ago
  > Mozilla is a non-profit that is only sustained by the generous wealthy benefactor (Google) to give the illusion that there is competition in the browser market. Good way of phrasing things. Kinda sad to read this, I tried to react with 'wait there is competition in the browser market', but it is not a great argument to make - without money for using Google as a default search engine, Mozilla would effectively collapse.
  - chii 10mo ago
    > Mozilla would effectively collapse. given how bloated it (the org) is, i think that may be a good thing. Return firefox to good old community contributions, and donations from users.
    - blackenedgem 10mo ago
      The main issue there is you need someway to pay the engineers in that transitional period the moment Mozilla collapses. Otherwise they leave, find new jobs, and you lose all the expertise and knowledge of the codebase.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]

dragonwriter 10mo ago

bibimsz 10mo ago

anecdotal, but my wife wasn't interested in switching to claude from chatgpt. as far as she's concerned chatgpt knows her, and she's got her assistant perfectly tuned to her liking.

munchler 10mo ago
ChatGPT is to AI as Facebook is to social media. OpenAI captured a significant number of users due to first-mover advantage, but that advantage is long gone now.
- felixfurtak 10mo ago
  And Facebook only makes money because it is essentially just an advertising platform. Same with Google. It's fundametally just ads. The only way OpenAI can survive is to replicate this model. But it probably doesn't have the traffic to pull it off unless it can differentiate itself from the already crowded competition.
  - wavemode 10mo ago
    Ads make sense in an AI search engine product like Perplexity. ChatGPT could try to make a UI like that. But the thing is, the world already has an AI search engine. It's called Google, and it's already heavily integrated with Gemini. Why would people switch?
- jimbokun 10mo ago
  1. ChatGPT would be MySpace as the first mover. 2. Facebook has insane lock in: your entire graph of friends and family.
tofuahdude 10mo ago
Same situation over here. Multiple family members only know chatgpt / think that chatgpt knows them and have never heard of the competitors.
- 10mo ago

jmyeet 10mo ago

Oh God I love the analogy of OpenAI being Netscape. As someone who was an adult in the 1990s, this is so apt. Companies at that time were trying to build a moat around the World Wide Web. They obviously failed. I've thought that OpenAI too would fail but I've never thought about it like Netscape and WWW. OpenAI should be looking at how Google built a moat around search. Anyone can write a Web crawler. Lots of people have. But no one else has turned search into the money printing machine that Google has. And they've used that to fund their search advantage. I've long thought the moat-buster here will be China because they simply won't want the US to own this future. It's a national security issue. I see things like DeepSeek is moat-busting activity and I expect that to intensify. Currently China can't buy the latest NVidia chips or ASML lithography equipment. Why? Because the US said so. I don't expect China to tolerate this long term and of any country, China has desmonstrated the long-term commitment to this kind of project.

asdfman123 10mo ago

I know it's been said before but it's slightly insane they're trying to compete on a hot new tech with a company with 1) a top notch reputation for AI and 2) the largest money printer that has ever existed on the planet. Feel like the end result would always be that while Google is slow to adjust, once they're in the race they're in it it.

margorczynski 10mo ago
The problem for Google is that there is no sensible way to monetize this tech and it undercuts their main money source which is search. On top of that the Chinese seem to be hellbent to destroy any possible moat the US companies might create by flooding the market with SOTA open-source models. Although this tech might be good for software companies in general - it does reduce the main cost they have which is personnel. But in the long run Google will need to reinvent itself or die.
- kelipso 10mo ago
  Gemini has been in Google search for a while now. I use it somewhat often when I search for something and want follow up questions. I don’t see any ads in Gemini but maybe I would see it if I search for ads relevant things idk. But I definitely use google search more often because Gemini is there and probably that goes for a lot of people.
- golfer 10mo ago
  Ads are already appearing in Google search AI overviews [1]. AI overviews have 2 billion users at the moment. [1] https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/16297775?hl=en https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/16297775?hl=en

TacticalCoder 10mo ago

> Google will do just what Microsoft did with Internet Explorer and bundle Gemini in for 'Free' with their already other profitable products and established ad-funded revenue streams. Just some numbers to show what OpenAI is against: GMail users: nearing 2 billion Youtube MAU: 2.5 billion active Android devices: 4 billion (!) Market cap: 3.8 trillion (at a P/E of 31) So on one side you've got this behemoth with, compared to OpenAI's size, unlimited funding. The $25 bn per year OpenAI is after is basically a parking ticket for Google (only slightly exaggerating). Behemoth who came with Gemini 3 Pro "thinking" and Nano Banana (that name though) who are SOTA. And on the other side you've got the open-source weights you mentioned. When OpenAI had its big moment HN was full of comments about how it was game over for Google for search was done for. Three years later and the best (arguably the best) model gives the best answer when you search... Using Google search. Funny how these things turns out. Google is atm the 3rd biggest cap in the world: only Apple and NVidia are slightly ahead. If Google is serious about its AI chips (and it looks like they are) and see the fuck-ups over fuck-ups by Apple, I wouldn't be surprised at all if Alphabet was to regain the number one spot. That's the company OpenAI is fighting: a company that's already been the biggest cap in the entire world and that's probably going to regain that spot rather sooner than later and that happens to have crushed every single AI benchmark when Gemini 3 Pro came out. I had a ChatGPT subscription. Now I'm using Gemini 3 Pro.

redwood 10mo ago
You just made it clear who needs to acquire openai.. it's going to be Apple! (Jonny Ive already there). And great points on the Google history.. let's not forget they wrote the original Transformers paper after all
- adgjlsfhk1 10mo ago
  the branding is all wrong. I could see Apple buying anthropic, but OpenAI is exactly the wrong ai company for Apple. openai is the tacky, slop based ai company. their main value is the brand and the users, but Apple already has a strong brand and billions of users. Apple needs an ai company with deployment experience and a good model, but paying for a brand and users doesn't make sense for them.

mips_avatar 10mo ago

Gemini can't be bundled for free unless they figure out how to make gemini flash 3.0 significantly cheaper to inference than 2.5

HDThoreaun 10mo ago
It can be bundled for "free" if they raise the price of google workspace. LLMs are right now most valuable as an enterprise productivity software assistant. Very useful to have a full suite of enterprise productivity software in order to sell them.
whywhywhywhy 10mo ago
Or put ads in it

vondur 10mo ago

I don't think the Government would let them fail, so long as the specter of the Chinese becoming dominant in AI is a thing.

dbspin 10mo ago

Literally got an email this morning from Google, to say my Google One plan now 'includes AI benefits' - including "More access to Gemini 3 Pro, our most capable model More access to Deep Research in the Gemini app Video generation with limited access to Veo 3.1 Fast in the Gemini app More access to image generation with Nano Banana Pro Additional AI credits for video generation in Flow and Whisk Access Gemini directly in Google apps like Gmail and Docs" [Thanks but no thanks]

vachina 10mo ago

OpenAI has tons of funnels for their products. Azure’s AI smoke and mirrors offerings uses openAI behind the scenes, big with enterprise users (who has a lot of money)