From a journalist at the dinner:
“I think that tends to end poorly because as demand for your service grows, you lose more and more money. Sam Altman actually addressed this at dinner. He was asked basically, are you guys losing money every time someone uses ChatGPT?
And it was funny. At first, he answered, no, we would be profitable if not for training new models. Essentially, if you take away all the stuff, all the money we're spending on building new models and just look at the cost of serving the existing models, we are sort of profitable on that basis.
And then he looked at Brad Lightcap, who is the COO, and he sort of said, right? And Brad kind of like squirmed in his seat a little bit and was like, well, we're pretty close.
We're pretty close. We're pretty close.
So to me, that suggests that there is still some, maybe small negative unit economics on the usage of ChatGPT. Now, I don't know whether that's true for other AI companies, but I think at some point, you do have to fix that because as we've seen for companies like Uber, like MoviePass, like all these other sort of classic examples of companies that were artificially subsidizing the cost of the thing that they were providing to consumers, that is not a recipe for long-term success.”
From Hard Fork: Is This an A.I. Bubble? + Meta’s Missing Morals + TikTok Shock Slop, Aug 22, 2025