[HN Gopher] OpenAI resets spending expectations, from $1.4T to $...
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OpenAI resets spending expectations, from $1.4T to $600B
Author : randycupertino
Score : 170 points
Date : 2026-02-24 18:22 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com)
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| So handwavy... 1.4T.. 600B. Pure marketing fluff to keep the hype
| machine going.
| lumost wrote:
| Didn't oracle take out real loans and spend real dollars based on
| this commitment?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Wasn't it always an expectation, not a commitment?
|
| If they didn't appropriately account for risk that the
| expectation would not pan out, well, that's on them.
| lupire wrote:
| How do you account for the risk of something that has ever
| happened before?
| quesera wrote:
| In the standard risk assessment and mitigation manner:
| imperfectly, but with the best information available at the
| time.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| I dunno, but if someone is saying they expect to spend a
| vast, unprecedented sum of money acquiring an
| interdependent set of resources that current production
| could not come anywhere close to accommodating in multiple
| dimensions, and which money they don't have and aren't
| making in their current operations so that it would also
| require unprecedented fundraising on top of the other
| issues, you'd probably want to do some work to verify the
| plausibility before putting your own resources at risk for
| the chance of profiting from that spending spree.
|
| Extraordinary claims and all.
| Yizahi wrote:
| The bankruptcy couldn't happen to nicer company.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| I too have reset my spending expectations down from $1.4T.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| best comment
| AvAn12 wrote:
| A wise move.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| ugh lower the interest rates Jerome, I'll do anything to tank
| the economy until you finally do.
| rhelz wrote:
| I have done my fair share of misunderestimating before, but
| I've never been off by that much.
| nova22033 wrote:
| and that's just my doordash order..
| paxys wrote:
| > OpenAI is projecting that its total revenue for 2030 will be
| more than $280 billion
|
| For context, that is more than the annual revenue of all but 3
| tech companies in the world (Nvidia, Apple, Google), and about
| the same as Microsoft.
|
| OpenAI meanwhile is projected to make $20 billion in 2026. So a
| casual 1300% revenue growth in under 4 years for a company that
| is already valued in the hundreds of billions.
|
| Must be nice to pull numbers out of one's ass with zero
| consequence.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I like the little blurb at the end which said that Codex had
| 1.5 million users. So, if you can get each of them to pony up a
| mere $186k a piece, they can hit those revenue numbers.
| sunaookami wrote:
| Don't forget that Codex is free until March so the numbers
| are heavily inflated.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > Codex had 1.5 million users
|
| I'm three of them and I never spent a cent on any llms, I
| doubt I'm the only one
| Betelbuddy wrote:
| Its a circular economy...He is talking about the money moving
| from Nvidia to OpenAI and back to Nvidia. You got to go with
| the flow...
|
| He is counting on hundreds of husbands: https://xkcd.com/605/
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| How will Nvidia give revenue to OpenAI?
| AtheistOfFail wrote:
| Nvidia gives money to OpenAI so they can buy GPUs that
| don't exist yet with memory that doesn't exist yet so they
| can plug them into their datacenters that don't exist yet
| powered by infrastructure that doesn't exist yet so they
| can all make profit that is mathematically impossible at
| this point - Stolen from someone else.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| There are other forms of money transfer than revenue.
| Betelbuddy wrote:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-ai-circular-deals/
| AtheistOfFail wrote:
| > Its a circular economy
|
| Garbage in, garbage out, same as before.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| 1.4T was estimate by gpt4/5, 600b by gpt5.3?
|
| they'll probably fix it just like they did fix strawberry
|
| their estimates will drop by ~20x which will be their max
|
| as underdog in the race they'll grab fraction of even that
|
| where are they planning to get that much money from? by
| showing adverts for 14h before you can prompt?
| raincole wrote:
| > a casual 1300% revenue growth in under 4 years for a company
| that is already valued in the hundreds of billions.
|
| Such a weird sentence. The correct causality should be: It's
| valued in the hundreds of billions _because_ the investors
| expect a 1300% revenue growth.
| AvAn12 wrote:
| And if we all buy umbrellas, then it will start to rain??
| tibbar wrote:
| The metaphor for the original post was more like "You're
| already wearing a raincoat and umbrella, and you're
| forecasting a flood warning?" So, the flood warning
| (project revenue) may be completely incorrect, but it's not
| incongruous with the fact that I'm wearing a raincoat and
| umbrella (current investor valuation). :-)
| jonas21 wrote:
| I mean, if you go outside and everyone else is carrying an
| umbrella, it's probably going to rain.
| camdenreslink wrote:
| Or the town has been hoodwinked by a smooth talking
| umbrella salesman.
| highwaylights wrote:
| Again!?!!
| dwattttt wrote:
| Mono! Doh!
| quxbar wrote:
| If you go outside and they are burning witches, it's best
| to go along with it.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| If you go outside and see people buying tulips, it
| doesn't mean that tulips are great investments.
|
| Another example is how Isaac Newton lost money on some
| other bubble as well:
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/market-crash-
| cost-... [ The market crash which cost newton fortune]
|
| So even if NEWTON, the legendary ISAAC NEWTON could lose
| money in bubble and was left holding umbrellas when there
| was no rain.
|
| From the book Intelligent investor, I want to get a quote
| so here it goes (opened the book from my shelf, the page
| number is 13)
|
| The great physicist muttered that he "could calculate the
| motions of the heavenly bodies, but not hte madness of
| the people"
|
| This quote seems soo applicable in today's world, I am
| gonna create a parent comment about it as well.
|
| Also, For the rest of Newton's life, he forbade anyone to
| speak the words "South Sea" in his pressence.
|
| Newton lost more than $3 Million in today's money because
| of the south sea company bubble.
| seanhunter wrote:
| People often use that example, but Newton, for all he was
| unquestionably a giant of physics, was a bit of a weird
| dude and not 100% rationalist[1]. Additionally, just
| because he was a great physicist doesn't mean he knew
| anything at all about investment. You can be an expert in
| one field and pretty dumb in others. Linus Pauling (a
| giant in chemistry) had beliefs in terms of medicine that
| were basically pseudoscience.
|
| Intelligent investor is a great book though.
|
| [1] eg he wrote more than a million words on alchemy
| during his lifetime
| https://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/newton/project/about.do
| roenxi wrote:
| > ...was a bit of a weird dude and not 100%
| rationalist...
|
| That covers everyone. Especially and including the
| rationalists. Part of being highly intelligent is being a
| bit weird because the habits and beliefs of ordinary
| people are those you'd expect of people with ordinary
| intelligence.
|
| Anyone involved in small-time investing should be
| considering that they aren't rational when setting their
| strategy. Larger investment houses do what they can but
| even then every so often will suffer from group-think
| episodes.
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| perhaps tis not the rain but the sun they fear.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| That would be compatible with them carrying umbrellas;
| https://www.etymonline.com/word/umbrella
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| This greatly overestimates the rationality of markets.
| jwolfe wrote:
| They said casual, not causal.
| raincole wrote:
| I didn't read it wrong. And the illogical part isn't
| 'casual.' It's the whole sentence, especially 'already.'
| rchaud wrote:
| How much money was WeWork supposed to bring in when they were
| valued at $50 billion and it dropped to $10b when they put
| out their S-1 and faced some public scrutiny for the first
| time? This happened before covid and the switch to WFH. Were
| their investors unaware of their actual finances?
| paxys wrote:
| Investors are valuing it at ~$500B, which already projects
| _massive_ revenue growth. OpenAI is saying "actually we are
| going to grow 10x faster than that". And all of this is
| without bringing up the "profit" word.
| mandeepj wrote:
| Oracle said something very similar, a short while ago.
| Besides a short lived peak, it didn't do any good to their
| stock thus market valuation.
| ActionHank wrote:
| Consequences come later friendo.
| re-thc wrote:
| > and about the same as Microsoft
|
| > Must be nice to pull numbers out of one's ass with zero
| consequence.
|
| Seems accurate?
|
| What they are saying is if Microsoft ends up buying the rest of
| their shares then i.e. Microsoft's total revenue by 2030 will
| be more than $280 billion.
| paul7986 wrote:
| I was a paying customer ($20 a month) until AI prompted a
| layoff in my dying field that is web design and front end
| design coding. Now everytime chatGPT yells at me about memory i
| tell it fine Im just gonna use Gemini! I bet a lot of ppl are
| doing the same thing as both sit at the top of the iPhone
| charts.
| tibbar wrote:
| Today I got a feature request from another team in a call. I
| typed into our slack channel as a note. Someone typed @cursor
| and moments later the feature was implemented (correctly) and
| ready to merge.
|
| The tools are good! The main bottleneck right now is better
| scaffolding so that they can be thoroughly adopted and so that
| the agents can QA their own work.
|
| I see no particular reason not to think that software
| engineering as we know it will be massively disrupted in the
| next few years, and probably other industries close behind.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| It really doesn't matter how "good" these tools feel, or
| whatever vague metric you want - they hemorrhage cash at a
| rate perhaps not seen in human history. In other words, that
| usage you like is costing them tons of money - the bet is
| that energy/compute will become vastly cheaper in a matter of
| a couple of years (extremely unlikely), or they find other
| ways to monetize that don't absolutely destroy the utility of
| their product (ads, an area we have seen google flop in
| spectacularly).
|
| And even say the latter strategy works - ads are driven by
| consumption. If you believe 100% openAI's vision of these
| tools replacing huge swaths of the workforce reasonably
| quickly, who will be left to consume? It's all nonsense, and
| the numbers are nonsense if you spend any real time
| considering it. The fact SoftBank is a major investor should
| be a dead giveaway.
| nfg wrote:
| > In other words, that usage you like is costing them tons
| of money
|
| Evidence? I'm sure someone will argue, but I think it's
| generally accepted that inference can be done profitably at
| this point. The cost for equivalent capability is also
| plummeting.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| I didn't think there would need to be more evidence than
| the fact they are saying they need to spend $600 billion
| in 4 years on $13bn revenue currently, but here we are.
|
| Here you go: https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-
| market-today-dow-sp-5...
| tibbar wrote:
| Right, but if OpenAI wanted to stop doing research and
| just monetize its current models, all indications are
| that it would be profitable. If not, various adjustments
| to pricing/ads/ etc could get it there. However, it has
| no reason to do this, and like all the other labs is
| going insanely into debt to develop more models. I'm not
| saying that it's necessarily going to work out, but
| they're far from the first company to prioritize growth
| over profitability
| zippothrowaway wrote:
| Nope. The only "all indications" are that they say so.
| They _may_ be making a profit on API usage, but even that
| is very suspect - compare against how much it actually
| costs to rent a rack of B200s from Microsoft. But for the
| millions of people using Codex /Claude Code/Copilot, the
| costs of $20-$30-$200 clearly don't compare to the actual
| cost of inference.
| javascriptfan69 wrote:
| What was the feature and what was the note?
| tibbar wrote:
| It was a modest update to a UX ... certainly nothing world-
| changing. (It's also had success with some backend
| performance refactors, but this particular change was all
| frontend.) The note was basically just a transcription of
| what I was asked to do, and did not provide any technical
| hints as to how to go about the work. The agent figured out
| what codebase, application, and file to modify and made the
| correct edit.
| javascriptfan69 wrote:
| That's pretty neat! Thanks for elaborating.
| nemooperans wrote:
| The anecdote is compelling, but there's an interesting
| measurement gap. METR ran a randomized controlled trial with
| experienced open-source developers -- they were actually 19%
| slower with AI assistance, but self-reported being 24%
| faster. A ~40 point perception gap.
|
| Doesn't mean the tools aren't useful -- it means we're
| probably measuring the wrong thing. "Prompt engineering" was
| always a dead end that obscured the deeper question: the
| structure an AI operates within -- persistent context,
| feedback loops, behavioral constraints -- matters more than
| the model or the prompts you feed it. The real intelligence
| might be in the harness, not the horse.
| tibbar wrote:
| Respectfully, was this comment AI generated? It has all the
| signs.
|
| And scaffolding does matter a lot, but mostly because the
| models just got a lot better and the corresponding
| scaffolding for long running tasks hasn't really caught up
| yet.
| akudha wrote:
| I have used AI a bit, like it for a bunch of use cases. But god
| damn, these numbers are so big. Gotta wonder, are the returns
| even worth it? RAM prices up, electricity prices up, hard disk
| prices up... Maybe this is the price to pay for "progress", but
| it sure is wild
| m4rtink wrote:
| Simple - they returns are not worth it. :-)
| chrisandchris wrote:
| You're missing one point: they are just talking about
| revenue. Nobody said something about making profit.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| I think he meant for Anthropic?
| TimPC wrote:
| OpenAI is a bet on LLMs replacing a large chunk of the labour
| force in whatever sector it's best at replacing. It's
| essentially looking to get companies to pay $5k-$10k a month to
| have coding agents replace the output of a single software
| engineer.
|
| If the S-curve levels off below that level OpenAI will be an
| unsuccessful company.
| parliament32 wrote:
| I, too, can make $280B in revenue by 2030 (by selling $10 bills
| for $5 (as long as I bamboozle enough investors into giving me
| sufficient capital, of course)).
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| I honestly don't think that sounds terribly outrageous.
|
| OpenAI and Anthropic aren't building companies that aim to be
| API endpoints or chatbots forever, their vision is clearly: you
| will do _everything_ through them.
|
| The gamble is that this change is going to reach deeper into
| every business it touches than Microsoft Office ever did, and
| that this will happen extremely quickly. The way things are
| headed I increasingly think that's not a terrible bet.
| guelo wrote:
| Doubling every year gets you to 1300% in 4 years. They have
| exceeded that for the past 5 years.
| tyre wrote:
| It's interesting that they felt the need to leak this to the
| press.[0] Some investors or partners (or LPs, board members, etc.
| of those) are getting spooked by the spending plans and
| rightfully questioning if the return is there. Putting it in
| public my feel like a stronger commitment (though I doubt it.)
|
| Even with the revised numbers, I cannot believe that they'll have
| $280bn in revenue by 2030.
|
| [0]: You can tell by the reason the sources are granted
| anonymity: because the information is private, not because they
| aren't authorized to speak on the matter
| carefree-bob wrote:
| These numbers were always out of line with basic infrastructure
| constraints. People were talking like the US would build 50 new
| nuclear power plants in 10 years. And I believe we will not see
| $600B either, there are basic infrastructure, permitting, and
| power delivery limits.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| However, we are all going to be paying higher energy costs for
| these ridiculous infrastructure claims. Utilities typically
| price out energy three years in advance. If they were
| protecting for twice as many energy sinks, that represents an
| enormous amount of generation capacity which needs to be
| accounted for in projections.
|
| I saw a report that previous capacity pricing was $28/MWh/day.
| Latest numbers have shot up to $300.
| carefree-bob wrote:
| Absolutely, and that's why we should be applying higher
| infrastructure fees to the permitting of data centers. The
| problem is that local governments want the tax revenue and
| are willing to screw over their constituents. This also goes
| in line with the decline of local newspapers, there is an
| epidemic of fraud and abuse of power happening in local
| governments across the country.
| rchaud wrote:
| It's not unforeseeable that the US demarcates Special Economic
| Zones without environmental oversight or labor regulations to
| speed up the construction.
| cmiles8 wrote:
| This is more complicated than just hand wavy spending expectation
| resets. Other companies were taking these "commitments" and
| gearing up for capital investments to meet all that demand which
| is now vaporizing. That creates a big mess as the hype AI hype
| machine starts to unravel.
|
| This looks very much like a careful move to deflate the bubble
| without popping it, but we've likely passed that point.
| locusofself wrote:
| The market is spooked by capex projections generally. Interesting
| that Microsoft, despite some apparent hesitation in 2025, seems
| to be still going all in on AI spend over the next several years
| according to the most recent earnings call.
| agentifysh wrote:
| MS, GOOG bonds being sold to fund capex still put them green
| $/employee, they will survive of not thrive.
|
| OpenAI...not so sure, they need an IPO soon while public still
| is high off the double bull run post 2020
| oxag3n wrote:
| We are at the end of the exponential!
|
| 90% chance in 6-12 months spending expectations drop to $0.
| iSloth wrote:
| Based on what? Each model so far has been noticeably better
| than the last, so I don't see why the next wouldn't be too?
| oxag3n wrote:
| "Can't you just draw an exponential line on the curve?" -
| Dario Amodei, February 13th 2026.
|
| But this time draw it for spending expectations.
| quesera wrote:
| Are you predicting that OpenAI is out of business in 6-12
| months?
|
| I'm not an AI booster, and I don't see "sustainable" in the
| current markets, but I'd take the other side of that bet!
| janalsncm wrote:
| Even if that were true, it wouldn't make the growth
| exponential. There are many other trajectories out there.
| iSloth wrote:
| Even if it's not exponential, I still can't see logic in it
| going to zero.
| ryandvm wrote:
| I don't get it.
|
| A trillion here, a trillion there and all the AI companies are
| also telling us they're planning on wiping out 2/3 of jobs in the
| next 10 years? Nothing about the economics of the AI boom makes
| any sense.
|
| I'm not saying it's not possible, but if we wipe out 2/3 of jobs
| with AI, who is going to be buying *all the stuff*?
|
| Unemployed people aren't much of a demographic, and you can't
| just say UBI because that doesn't make sense either. You think
| the billionaires are going to allow themselves to be taxed
| heavily enough to support UBI just so that there's a market for
| people to buy stuff from them? That's nonsense.
|
| Not trying to creep anybody out, but I just don't see a stable
| outcome for a society that doesn't need 2/3 of the population.
| tgrowazay wrote:
| > You think the billionaires are going to allow themselves to
| be taxed heavily enough to support UBI
|
| They will have no choice. Proletariat must not be hungry and
| agitated. Free legal MJ for everyone!
| irishcoffee wrote:
| A gramme a day...
| llIIllIIllIIl wrote:
| Keeps the doctor away?
| irishcoffee wrote:
| It's from a book called Brave New World.
|
| If you want some light reading: 1984, brave new world,
| and atlas shrugged will mostly get you caught up on
| current events.
| rustyhancock wrote:
| In fairness it's mostly Anthropic that is constantly banging
| the were taking your jobs drum.
|
| Everyone else has been less explicit, likely because it's just
| not politically a good idea to keep pronouncing it.
|
| It's part of Anthropics marketing though. Maybe to push the
| idea you can't beat us so join us?
| lumost wrote:
| Anthropic is running a similar marketing campaign as
| AWS/Devops tools which were trying to replace in-house IT.
| Pitch to the few that you can be 10/100x as productive and
| valuable on the hopes that they will push their organizations
| in this direction.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| > Nothing about the economics of the AI boom makes any sense.
|
| what if... MBAs turned from economics to a religion and no one
| noticed?
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Unbelievable! Next you'll tell us that Elon's self driving
| car promises were all just hype for the cult...
| pluralmonad wrote:
| Econ has always been a bit faith based as it is.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Depends. The basics are testable. An explanation of
| scarcity is available in Basic Economics and should be
| required reading (Sowell)... but whatever this VC nightmare
| thing is... I agree.
| unglaublich wrote:
| The viability of a currency is nothing more than faith.
| tantalor wrote:
| The singularity is nigh
| famouswaffles wrote:
| >I'm not saying it's not possible, but if we wipe out 2/3 of
| jobs with AI, who is going to be buying _all the stuff_?
|
| Money is just a proxy for access to resources. If a machine
| that is capable of replacing almost all jobs is really created
| then money will matter much less than access to said machine.
| Taken to the extreme to make the point, if you had a genie that
| could grant your every wish, what would you need money for ?
| sarchertech wrote:
| Yeah but what if that genie charges money for wishes.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| > If you had a genie that could grant your every wish, what
| would you need money for ?
|
| The things that a magic AI Genie will never be able to give
| you no matter how far into the AGI/Singularity things get.
| Such as Land, Energy, Precious Metals, Political and Social
| Capital, etc.
| unglaublich wrote:
| Georgism is the only way forward. Tax land, energy, metals,
| and other constrained natural resources, not labour.
| lupire wrote:
| 'Political and Social Capital" don't belong on that list.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Money is a proxy for the value of peoples' time. Since AIs
| are not people, they cannot create value.
| thomquaid wrote:
| Couldnt they create value by saving people's time? Like a
| shovel, or a bulldozer.
| xienze wrote:
| OpenAI is not going to pay off my mortgage, it's not going to
| replace my roof, it's not going to fix my car, and so on.
| Money is still going to be very necessary for goods and
| services.
| famouswaffles wrote:
| I don't see what point you are making here. I responded to
| OP asking about "who is going to buy all the stuff". The
| people who would be concerned with that are by and large
| not stressed about paying house mortgages, replacing roofs
| or fixing cars.
|
| And if they were, then the machine will just do all that
| for them. That's the point. The things you mentioned don't
| need intrinsically need money. The machine can fix or
| create whatever car, replace whatever roof, and build
| whatever house.
| xienze wrote:
| > The people who would be concerned with that are by and
| large not stressed about paying house mortgages,
| replacing roofs or fixing cars.
|
| Well they should be, because actually putting 2/3rds of
| the workforce out of work in a short, sudden fashion is
| probably not going to end well for them.
|
| > The things you mentioned don't need intrinsically need
| money. The machine can fix or create whatever car,
| replace whatever roof, and build whatever house.
|
| What machine is this? It certainly doesn't exist and
| won't in the short timeframe these AI companies are
| predicting everyone is gonna be laid off. Maybe, maybe if
| the timeframe for "no one has a job anymore" happens over
| say, 100 years, things might go slowly. Over two or three
| years? Heads will roll.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| UBI is a more of a convenient trick we use to suppress the part
| of our conscious that tells us "wiping out 2/3 of American jobs
| is Bad".
| rchaud wrote:
| Companies will save billions on those pesky health insurance
| premiums and payroll taxes...by paying for OAI tokens instead.
|
| Then when the labor market is nice and hollowed out, the tokens
| will go up in price several-fold.
| unglaublich wrote:
| We're already there. Most of us have jobs that are just made up
| to fill the gaps after steam power and automation. In the
| future, we'll have jobs that fill up the AI gap. It's UBI, but
| more arbitrary so we can tell ourselves we're useful while
| group X is not.
| ryandvm wrote:
| Hmmm. I wonder if you get to choose between window maker or
| window breaker.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| I've seen no discussion about what the social consequences are
| going to be if a predicted 2/3rds of people lose their jobs.
|
| I don't imagine they're pretty.
| babelfish wrote:
| "It may be difficult to know what role money will play in a
| post-AGI world."
| lupire wrote:
| Tripling productivity is not the same as thirding jobs. Demand
| will grow. People enjoy products and services.
| windexh8er wrote:
| Tripling productivity? Where? You can say this but where is
| this measurement being sourced. Every time I ask how LLMs can
| simply replace a real front desk assistant I get responses
| like: well that use case isn't viable because <enter excuse
| here>.
|
| > "People enjoy products and services." ???
|
| WTF does that even mean? Folks are so deluded with all of
| these "right around the corner" solves that AI has in store
| that they fail to realize how out of whack the numbers game
| has played out. In any other reality people would be
| scrutinizing Sam Altman at every angle. But because of some
| magical AI sauce the incomprehensible numbers now magically
| make sense.
|
| But for a lot of us: it doesn't. If you're going to claim
| hundreds of billions in revenue, just a few short years from
| now, you better have a really fucking great product _today_.
| Not in 6 months, not in a year - but right now.
|
| SaaS has not been displaced. Workers have not been displaced
| (other than shifting their salaries to AI spend which does
| not equate to worker replacement). Where does madness end?
| The only thing that makes sense is an implosion that will
| ripple all the way through many other markets which will now
| take years to fix.
| Yizahi wrote:
| In the ex-USSR internet segment there was a saying on nerd
| forums - "Don't know matan(1), will convert you to methane".
| Just saying :) . It's not like billionaire sociopaths had ever
| any issues with "useless" humans. Peter Thiel even follows a
| modern neo-religion along those lines.
|
| (1) matan - _mat_ hematical _an_ alysis, as a reference to a
| widely known and hard to learn university course.
| nyxtom wrote:
| Welcome to late stage capitalism. Where non of the incentives
| have anything to do with helping people and reducing costs for
| things people care about - energy, food, healthcare, basic
| needs.
| Saig6 wrote:
| The 1.4T commitments was over 8 years, not by 2030.
|
| https://x.com/sama/status/1986514377470845007
| louiereederson wrote:
| This article is bad. It is mixing up capex and opex. OpenAI is
| projecting more spending on compute through their income
| statement now than they were 6 months ago.
| jjkaczor wrote:
| So are all the RAM, GPU and HD manufacturers going to honour
| their purchasing commitments?
| snowhale wrote:
| this is the underreported second-order risk. Micron, Samsung,
| SK Hynix all allocated HBM capacity based on hyperscaler capex
| projections. NAND fabs are similarly committed. a 57% reduction
| in projected OpenAI spend (.4T -> B) doesn't just affect NVIDIA
| orders -- it ripples into the memory suppliers who shifted
| capacity to HBM and away from commodity DRAM/NAND. if multiple
| hyperscalers revise down simultaneously you get a situation
| similar to the 2019 crypto ASIC overhang: companies tooled up
| for demand that evaporated. not predicting that, but the
| purchasing commitments question is real.
| basilgohar wrote:
| Maybe we'll get cheap HBM DIMMs in a year or two due to this
| oversupply. We gotta think positive!
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| So does that mean they aren't buying up all storage production
| capacity for the foreseeable future now?
| ralusek wrote:
| Has AI transformed the economy radically? Yes.
|
| Will it continue to transform the economy radically? Yes.
|
| Will that translate to the model-makers somehow capturing the
| entire value of the transformed economy? No.
|
| There were a few key moments that revealed this. When OpenAI
| initially declared "there is no moat," I wasn't sure whether to
| believe them. GPT 3.5 and 4 were so much better than the
| competition, it felt like them saying that they had no moat was
| some sort of attempt to avoid regulation or scrutiny. But then,
| lo and behold, Claude and Gemini caught up; there really was no
| moat.
|
| But up until then, while it was clear that there was no moat
| around OpenAI, it was unclear if there was a moat around big
| tech. Mistral was meh. Even Meta's were meh. We also had no idea
| how much these models actually cost to run. It wasn't until the
| "DeepSeek moment," and especially once these open source models
| actually started being hosted on third party services, that it
| became clear that this was actually a competitive landscape.
|
| And as has already been demonstrated, because the interface for
| all of these models is just plain language, the cost of switching
| models is basically non-existent.
| random3 wrote:
| "there is no moat" usually mean "we have no moat" or "we want
| you to believe we have no moat". There are always moats, like
| being directly in front of eyes and thumbs (Apple) or having
| extensive data (Google) along hardware production capabilities,
| datacenters, and tons of money.
| tiahura wrote:
| _Has AI transformed the economy radically? Yes._
|
| AI made "basically zero" difference in U.S. economic growth
| last year. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZHN0-ZNe_4&t=399s
| agentifysh wrote:
| as I've said previously, OpenAI will be bailed out by US
| taxpayers. This isnt just another bubble, its a bubble within a
| bubble.
|
| Seeing the same setup in 2008 and now. Enjoy your subsidized
| $200/month codex because its going to go up in the future.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46439545
| chasd00 wrote:
| first bullet from the link
|
| > After previously boasting $1.4 trillion in infrastructure
| commitments, OpenAI is now telling investors that it plans to
| spend $600 billion by 2030.
|
| does the word "commitment" have a different meaning in this
| context? How do you cut a commitment >50%? OpenAI's partners are
| making decisions based on the previous commitment because..
| OpenAI committed to it. I must be completely wrong because how
| does this not set off a severe chain reaction?
|
| edit: as others have pointed out, the article is misleading.
| $1.4T was over 8 years or by 2034. 2030 is halfway to 2034 and
| $600B is not too far from half of $1.4T.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I think TSMC laughed them out of the room when they announced
| the original numbers. So maybe there's no reaction now because
| everyone already knew not to trust OpenAI's promises.
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| These were more like infrastructure suggestions.
| raincole wrote:
| > how does this not set off a severe chain reaction?
|
| Just like you and me, Sam Altman can say anything he likes to
| say. To pump the investors' confidence, to make the US
| administration believe he's serious about AGI, or just to make
| himself feel good. It's not legally binding in any way.
|
| You should never read it as "OpenAI committed to..." but as
| "Altman said these words..." and words mean _very_ little
| today.
| gehsty wrote:
| It is insane that they have this little of a handle on their
| buildout. It makes the $600B feel even more empheral.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| From another comment I wrote here but I am gonna paste a quote I
| found from Intelligent Investor (page 13) from Isaac Newton
| during the hottest stock of his time in his country, South Sea
| company.
|
| The great physicist muttered that he "could calculate the motions
| of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of the people"
|
| There seems to be a lot of madness happening in the world again
| as well. A lot of OpenAI claims make no sense except if we
| consider the world to have gone mad.
|
| The bubbly nature of openAI and just doing whatever they think
| like doing with 0 regards to anything or everything including
| financials is a form of madness.
|
| I was reading another comment and actually opened up the
| Intelligent Investor book to read the quote from there. I highly
| recommend that book although truth be told that I haven't read
| more than the first 50-100 pages as I quickly felt like passive
| investment is a great vehicle personally.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| It doesn't matter.
|
| Both numbers are fictional. No one really expects any of this to
| be true.
|
| The people who claim to believe this are simply lying.
| HackerThemAll wrote:
| Ponzi scheme. Scam. I don't trust OpenAI a tiny bit.
| vfclists wrote:
| Does this mean RAM is going to get cheaper?
| adverbly wrote:
| What do we think? Is this possible without AGI level
| breakthroughs?
|
| If we see a continuation or even a slowdown of the current trend,
| the technology overhang, lagging productization, and catch up
| from the slow adoption of AI by businesses probably gets them
| part of the way there, but I don't know about 1000% growth at
| this point... Seems kinda like they're banking on another
| breakthrough no? And if they don't get the breakthrough, the
| downside risks such as a competitor of some sort destroying their
| margin can't exactly be ignored...
| anizan wrote:
| OpenAI doesnt have a single model in top 10 models being used on
| openrouter.ai
|
| Thats a weekly metric on https://openrouter.ai/rankings flagship
| chatgpt 5.2 model is at #16
|
| PMF is now evolving when competitor models are either smarter or
| cheaper.
| mrkeen wrote:
| I hadn't heard of openrouter.ai. I have heard of OpenAI.
|
| Is this like Windows and MacOS not being in the top 10 of
| distrowatch.com?
| sadeshmukh wrote:
| OpenRouter is the leading place to go to to get general
| purpose models of all sorts. It's fairly popular, and
| processes tens of trillions of tokens a year.
| Garlef wrote:
| Could also just be a bias in the audience
| btown wrote:
| OpenAI, frankly, benefits from the "nobody ever got fired for
| buying IBM" phenomenon.
|
| And there's a reason that OpenRouter has an OpenAI compatible
| layer highlighted not deep in docs, but on their Quickstart
| page: https://openrouter.ai/docs/quickstart#using-the-openai-
| sdk
|
| The number of projects accessing OpenAI directly, who might
| only reach for OpenRouter once an alternative is desired, is
| unknowable (since OpenAI doesn't share usage statistics), but
| likely meaningful.
| MeetingsBrowser wrote:
| The number of tokens seen per model on OpenRouter is not a good
| measure of quality.
|
| There are so many plausible explanations for why a particular
| model is or is not ranked in the top 10 by this metric.
|
| Maybe people using OpenAI models are so happy that they don't
| care about other models and have no need for OpenRouter. Maybe
| OpenAI models produce fewer tokens, or are more expensive per
| token.
|
| Your conclusion might be correct, but citing the number of
| tokens seen by OpenRouter is not very strong evidence.
| anizan wrote:
| If ChatGPT 5.2 were actually superior, developers wouldn't be
| overwhelmingly routing traffic to Gemini 3.1 Pro just 6 days
| after release.
|
| I use openrouter.ai as the benchmark because it's the
| foundational API layer for innovator apps that are always the
| quickest to adopt new tech.
| MeetingsBrowser wrote:
| ChatGPT has 100x more interest on google trends than Gemini
| and OpenRouter combined, which in the context of this
| article is a much more relevant "popularity score".
|
| But I don't think either are very meaningful when there are
| actual benchmarks to measure the quality of models on
| specific tasks.
| nova22033 wrote:
| Wasn't most of this spending going to ORCL?
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/ORCL
|
| Remember this press conference?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYUoANr3cMo
| throw_rust wrote:
| They sure are humble for people who say they are building God.
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