Readit Newsabaymado commented on OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss techinasia.com/news/opena... · Posted by u/breadsniffer
I think the most interesting numbers in this piece (ignoring the stock compensation part) are:
$4.3 billion in revenue - presumably from ChatGPT customers and API fees
$6.7 billion spent on R&D
$2 billion on sales and marketing - anyone got any idea what this is? I don't remember seeing many ads for ChatGPT but clearly I've not been paying attention in the right places.
Open question for me: where does the cost of running the servers used for inference go? Is that part of R&D, or does the R&D number only cover servers used to train new models (and presumably their engineering staff costs)?
> $2 billion on sales and marketing - anyone got any idea what this is?
I used to follow OpenAI on Instagram, all their posts were reposts from paid influencers making videos on "How to X with ChatGPT." Most videos were redundant, but I guess there are still billions of people that the product has yet to reach.
Apple burned a lot of goodwill with developers over the years with App Store. Developers play by Apple's rules on App Store, because iPhone is such an attractive (and obviously hugely successful platform).
But when Vision Pro came, no developer wanted to give in very quickly. Netflix and YouTube sat out, and so did Spotify. And why not? They learned their lesson with App Store - you give an inch to Apple, and they'll bully you for years.
The same thing is playing out with Apple CarPlay Ultra. Ford (and other manufacturers) dont want Apple to barge in and bully their territory.
If only Apple were a little less selfish, they could have had this one
To add to this, I published an app on the Vision Pro App Store within the first few weeks of the Vision Pro release. A simple 3D garden that grows simultaneously as you complete your Pomodoro goals.
After the original release, I wanted to expand my app by adding more animals and plants. However, when I searched for my app in the App Store, it kept defaulting to iPhone/iPad apps. I don't have proof to support this, but it felt like it was done intentionally by Apple, and many developers were facing the same issue and started complaining, which eventually led Apple to decide to have the native store be the default search.
I have been shadow banned by EA before for selling an item at the auction below the average price, and this reminded me of that. I lost all interest in making apps for the Vision Pro or helping grow the ecosystem if Apple was going to be this greedy.
I have owned both Quest 3 and the Vision Pro. It is safe to say that what Meta lacks in quality, it makes up for with creativity.
When I initially bought the Quest 3, it felt unnatural, bulky, and had a poor resolution. I regretted the purchase after a few minutes. But then I started downloading apps, mainly social apps like "Big Screen", where random people can create/join rooms. I started joining these rooms with my 480p avatar with low expectations. But to my surprise, each room was unique, with crypto talks, atheist/religious debates. I accidentally even stumbled on a rap battle room, where people were passing around a mic and free styling. All of a sudden, it felt like the Metaverse. The social interaction overshadowed the corky avatar and somehow convinced my brain that I was talking to a real human being and not an avatar.
I got invited to demo the Vision Pro prior to its release. They had already announced it at WWDC at this point. Given the price tag and the fact that it is Apple, I had high expectations. I was not disappointed. In fact, I was even more amazed. The cinema was phenomenal. After a few updates, my avatar or persona, like Apple likes to call it, looked just like me. But the plateau came too fast. Everything I tried on demoed the first day was everything it had to offer, just with different content. I still use the Vision Pro 2/3 times a week to watch movies or shows, and it is still a mind-blowing experience, but nothing that would make me rush to put the Vision Pro on.
I wish Apple would follow Meta’s footprint and bring more social apps to the Vision Pro. I don't want to be on FaceTime with people I know and watch an Apple TV show. I want to join rooms with randoms arguing about why Bitcoin will be in the future.
abaymado commented on Show HN: I Built Fluent – macOS AI Writing Assistant epicbits.net/fluent... · Posted by u/importnil
This is awesome! I always wanted to utilize AI for my day to day work Slack convos, but the friction of switching apps was more than me just proof reading, if I even did.
abaymado commented on What happens when people don't understand how AI works theatlantic.com/culture/a... · Posted by u/rmason
LLMs are divinatory instruments, our era's oracle, minus the incense and theatrics. If we were honest, we'd admit that "artificial intelligence" is just a modern gloss on a very old instinct: to consult a higher-order text generator and search for wisdom in the obscure.
They tick all the boxes: oblique meaning, a semiotic field, the illusion of hidden knowledge, and a ritual interface. The only reason we don't call it divination is that it's skinned in dark mode UX instead of stars and moons.
Barthes reminds us that all meaning is in the eye of the reader; words have no essence, only interpretation. When we forget that, we get nonsense like "the chatbot told him he was the messiah," as though language could be blamed for the projection.
What we're seeing isn't new, just unfamiliar. We used to read bones and cards. Now we read tokens. They look like language, so we treat them like arguments. But they're just as oracular, complex, probabilistic signals we transmute into insight.
We've unleashed a new form of divination on a culture that doesn't know it's practicing one. That's why everything feels uncanny. And it's only going to get stranger, until we learn to name the thing we're actually doing. Which is a shame, because once we name it, once we see it for what it is, it won't be half as fun.
There have been a couple of instances, where I would try to debunk a conspiracy theory to a friend or family member and the next day, I would wake up to "Real/TikTok/Short" video with an AI narrating there exact argument. Most of the time, it's not even an LLM generated text turned to voice, rather an AI voice used to read a text the content creator has provided it. As long as it sounded like ChatGPT, Siri, "Her" combined with confirmation bias, people are treating these LLMs as their new oracles, as you may say.
abaymado commented on Just redesigned my personal site with a TTY-style interface abdisa.me/... · Posted by u/abdisaDev
Good job! Make it more mobile-friendly (only tested on iPhone). Like many others suggested, make the segments clickable for non-technical people to navigate, and add commands like cd, ls, etc., to make it more interesting for hackers. Gobez!
I like GPT wrapper's that let me personalize/customize existing real world things, and this a good example of that. I like it.
abaymado commented on Show HN: Node.js video tutorials where you can edit and run the code · Posted by u/somebee
This is phenomenon! I am an iOS Engineer, not sure if you ever want to bring this to mobile but I would be happy to contribute.
What is the typical learning project these days for beginners of a programming language?
In hindsight, it was a horrible way to learn. Most YouTubers probably benefited more from clickbait teaching than from actual fundamental teaching. Eventually, I was able to navigate the internet and land on an actual structured curriculum, whose lectures and courses were long and boring but taught you the fundamentals of programming.
I am picking up a similar pattern with Vibe Coding. Beginners are more excited about having a launched product wrapped with a band-aid rather than having deep knowledge.