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0 pointslittlestymaar3mo ago0 comments

Please tell me how being the third and 7th biggest companies in the world is “not even 1/10 enough” …

“Enough” for what exactly?

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It's not enough to pay for the size of the rollout the AI companies are doing. The difference between Google and OpenAI is that Google's add revenue comes at basically 0 cost. Google serves multiple adds for every search, and actually completing the search costs a tiny fractions of a cent (the majority of which is the cost to figure out what add to display). OpenAI is in a totally different boat. They get a similar number of adds per search, but each query will cost them far more than a simple web search. A paragraph or a single image costs OpenAI over 1c to generate, so you can't even cover the marginal costs on ads alone (google adds cost ~.1c per view).

Furthermore, OpenAI has to make up for a ton of debt they are taking on. They've already lost $9B, and are planning on losing another $75B in the next 2 years. As such, they have a ton of digging to do to get themselves out of the massive hole they're digging.

littlestymaarOP3mo ago

> OpenAI is in a totally different boat. They get a similar number of adds per search, but each query will cost them far more than a simple web search. A paragraph or a single image costs OpenAI over 1c to generate

First of all, your numbers a off by an order of magnitude at least: even GPT-5 can generate 1000 tokens for 1c, which is much more than a paragraph.

And then again that's why my entire argument revolved around the fact that OpenAI would need to stop aiming for the technological edge. Deepseek generates 25k tokens for a cent and it's still a gigantic model. I'd you use a model comparable in size to gpt-oss-120b you can even increase that up to 100-200k tokens per cent (going from 32GB worth of active parameters, 32B at q8 for Deepseek, to 4GB, 8B using MXFP4 for gpt-oss-120b). That would mean being able to serve more than 100 answers per cent spent on inference.

If they can serve .1c worth of ads per request, that's 90% gross margin for you.

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adgjlsfhk13mo ago

littlestymaarOP3mo ago

First of all, your numbers a off by an order of magnitude at least: even GPT-5 can generate 1000 tokens for 1c, which is much more than a paragraph.

If they can serve .1c worth of ads per request, that's 90% gross margin for you.

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