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Leaked OpenAI financials show $38.5B loss and compute burn

runtimewire.com

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Re: Leaked OpenAI financials show $38.5B loss and compute burn

#21

Post by philistine »

lukeschlather wrote: post #12

The R&D expenditure seems reasonable, and the revenue numbers seem realistic. I have no trouble believing they can be profitable by 2030 or much sooner. What I don't get is how you get from $30B in revenue to a nearly $1T valuation, but that seems almost level-headed compared to SpaceX, and it's not like any of the big tech companies' valuations make much sense in the context of their revenue.

> What I don't get is how you get from $30B in revenue to a nearly $1T valuation

There is something that has fundamentally changed (or broken, depending on your perspective) with the valuation of American tech companies. They've always traded at a premium, but the pandemic and the encroachment of the monopolists has turned the earth sour.

Re: Leaked OpenAI financials show $38.5B loss and compute burn

#22

Post by vkou »

treis wrote: post #14
vkou wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discounted contracts for big clients? Commissions? Both? If this can be trusted, they are selling $1 for ~95 cents, and are spending $3 on R&D. This is... Not an unsustainable business model as long as the money keeps flowing.

This is like Uber all over again. OpenAI is selling $1 for $2 and spending ~$5 to make that happen. The question is if they get to selling $1 for $2 long enough to make they're investment back.

That's not the question. They can obviously raise prices ~5% and be in the green when it comes to operational spending.

The better question is what will that $38B of R&D spending get.

Re: Leaked OpenAI financials show $38.5B loss and compute burn

#24

Post by bitmasher9 »

It’s a big number. I wonder what steps we will see to raise revenue leading up to an IPO, and specifically if they’ll cut off the OpenAI subscription that is powering my Open claw install. They have been quite friendly with using the oauth tokens in various harnesses.

Re: Leaked OpenAI financials show $38.5B loss and compute burn

#25

Post by jofzar »

throw310822 wrote: post #4

> OpenAI's spending mix shows why. The reported 2025 figures include $7.5 billion in cost of revenue, $19.18 billion in research and development, $5.73 billion in sales and marketing, and $1.57 billion in general and administrative expense How the hell did they spend 5.7 billion in "sales and marketing"?

I wonder if that includes discounts/commissions for enterprise api bundling (ie cheaper for partner company XYZ if they include openai in their app)

Re: Leaked OpenAI financials show $38.5B loss and compute burn

#26

Post by simoncion »

BosunoB wrote: post #11

13 billion in revenue, 7.5 in cost of revenue. Can we finally put to bed the idea that inference is subsidized?

> 13 billion in revenue, 7.5 in cost of revenue.

and 7.81 billion in R&D from last year. I don't know how long it took to build the weights for the current model, or exactly how much that costs, but it's certainly more than zero days and zero dollars.

I also doubt that OpenAI could set that R&D expense to zero and survive without an agreement from Anthropic that they'll do the same... so that R&D expense can't be ignored when figuring up the total cost of the current model.

Re: Leaked OpenAI financials show $38.5B loss and compute burn

#27

Post by maxnevermind »

> The reported 2025 figures include $7.5 billion in cost of revenue, $19.18 billion in research and development, $5.73 billion in sales and marketing, and $1.57 billion in general and administrative expense

Does training of new models go into RnD or cost? And subscription plans' subsidies, are those cost or sales and marketing?

Re: Leaked OpenAI financials show $38.5B loss and compute burn

#28

Post by appplication »

altmanaltman wrote: post #20
ungreased0675 wrote: post #2

Companies losing that much money a year shouldn’t be allowed to IPO. It leaves the public markets holding the bag.

An IPO doesn't mean public is forced to buy the stock. There is a choice for funds or individuals and if they chose to buy it, they should be allowed to in an open market. The other side of this are companies like Uber where (if we go by your logic), the public markets made a killing betting on a company that had massive losses. Should Uber also be blocked from an IPO even though objectively it turned out great? Inve…

Except certain indices are indeed forced to buy if the stock otherwise meets inclusion criteria, this was a somewhat controversial topic with the recent spacex IPO.

Re: Leaked OpenAI financials show $38.5B loss and compute burn

#29

Post by Der_Einzige »

Daily reminder that API pricing for both OpenAI and Anthropic is profitable today and that the cost of tokens for existing models falls sharply over time for a variety of reasons (unless we go into a far worse hardware inflationary environment than we are in today).

The only thing any of them are losing money on is the 200$ a month plans, and you betchya that they're moving as many enterprises to per token pricing as possible rapidly.

If you're not investing in these companies when they IPO and ideally before that if you are lucky enough to be rich, you deserve to not reap what you didn't sow.

Re: Leaked OpenAI financials show $38.5B loss and compute burn

#30

Post by riffraff »

lukeschlather wrote: post #12

The R&D expenditure seems reasonable, and the revenue numbers seem realistic. I have no trouble believing they can be profitable by 2030 or much sooner. What I don't get is how you get from $30B in revenue to a nearly $1T valuation, but that seems almost level-headed compared to SpaceX, and it's not like any of the big tech companies' valuations make much sense in the context of their revenue.

You see, in this _new economy_ you can't rely on old metrics to judge value.

At least that's what I remember from the 00s.

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