OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

Re:OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble question... by dheera on Tuesday December 30, 2025 @09:51PM (#46440771)

People seem to have the assumption that OpenAI and Anthropic dying would be synonymous with AI dying, and that's not the case. OpenAI and Anthropic spent a lot of capital on important research, and if the shareholders and equity markets cannot learn to value and respect that and instead let these companies die, new companies will be formed with the same tech, possibly by the same general group of people, thrive, and conveniently leave out the said shareholders.

Google was built on the shoulders of a lot of infrastructure tech developed by former search engine giants. Unfortunately the equity markets decided to devalue those giants instead of applaud them for their contributions to society.

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Re:OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble question... by raw_anon_1111 on Tuesday December 30, 2025 @10:50PM (#46441069)

You weren’t around pre Google were you? The only thing Google learned from other search engines is what not to do - like rank based on the number of times a keyword appeared and not to use expensive bespoked servers

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Re:OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble question... by dheera on Tuesday December 30, 2025 @11:52PM (#46441401)

I was around pre-Google.

Ranking was Google's 5% contribution to it. They stood on the shoulders of people who invented physical server and datacenter infrastructure, Unix/Linux, file systems, databases, error correction, distributed computing, the entire internet infrastructure, modern Ethernet, all kinds of stuff.

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Re:OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble question... by raw_anon_1111 on Tuesday December 30, 2025 @11:56PM (#46441429)

And none of that had to do with learning from other search engines…

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Re:OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble question... by golem14 on Wednesday December 31, 2025 @02:05AM (#46442076)

Eh ... I question that 5% ranking is google's only contribution, even if it was important.

Everyone stood on the shoulders of file systems and databases, ethernet (and firewalls and netscreens, ...) Well, maybe a few stood on the shoulder of PHP.

Google did in fact pretty much figure out how to scale large number of servers (their racking, datacenters, clustering, global file systems etc) before most others did. I believe it was their ability to run the search engine cheap enough that enabled them to grow while largely retaining profitability early on.

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Re:OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble question... by Izkata on Thursday January 01, 2026 @11:36AM (#46455419)

More specifically on that last point, I remember reading something like Google's biggest contribution hardware-wise was using lots of cheap, easliy-replaced distributed storage with redundancy instead of expensive large singular storage with error-correction? Or maybe it was memory and not storage. Whatever it was I remember them not caring as much about error correction as others, and being able to use relatively cheap hardware because of it.

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Re:OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble question... by ashirviskas on Wednesday December 31, 2025 @03:50AM (#46442506)

Yeah, I remember the moment search engines invented computing, I cannot look at sand the same way anymore /s

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Re:OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble question... by tootie on Tuesday December 30, 2025 @10:02PM (#46440815)

Isn't it really the other way around? Not to say OpenAI and Anthropic haven't done important work, but the genesis of this entire market was paper on attention that came out of Google. We have the private messages inside OpenAI saying they needed to get to market ASAP or Google would kill them.

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