111–120 of 278 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, no they do not. Those are operating expenses. This is accounting 101.
It's wild how basic math goes poof as soon as someone has an agenda to push in internet comment threads.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I heard from Ed Zitron that you can't really turn off "training" on these models even after they have been released because they need continuous re-training to keep up with the changes in the world and the language etc. Is this correct? if it is, can we even say that research can be turned off entirely?
it's completely false
"OpenAI generated $13.07 billion in revenue in 2025" Considering just four years ago they were a research lab with hardly any revenue at all, and no corporate muscles for earning revenue, I think that is a very impressive number. (Sure, they're losing a whole lot of money too. Same goes for almost every other hyper-growth company in the history of tech.)
Or a utility :) Look at how a utlity works, in setting price specifically, for things that are considered a public good. The story is not about how much profit or revenue they make. Its about how do you keep it afloat and expanding in the coming year. Thats it.
Revenue is higher than cost of revenue and revenue is growing faster than cost of revenue. We know OpenAI is forecasting $25-30B revenue for 2026. They will be very close to breaking even at those number. Given Anthropic has forecast more revenue than OpenAI and we know has spent less on R&D (cite their desperate scramble for compute capacity!) the rumours of them being profitable this year seem very credible.
They were first on a few things but the tell is the coherence of the thinking traces of Claude. You have to put a loss on that. GPT 5 series thinking traces are creepy, Gemini thinking traces are disturbing. They both represent forced discontinuities on the policy gradient.
Claude is good at tool use because it's gigantic and well-labeled, but the reason you pay the premium is for a thinking partner, not a tool user.
Claude Code is the cancer that will kill the patient, Boris is the the Kardashian version of Karpathy, with less business sense.
"OpenAI generated $13.07 billion in revenue in 2025" Considering just four years ago they were a research lab with hardly any revenue at all, and no corporate muscles for earning revenue, I think that is a very impressive number. (Sure, they're losing a whole lot of money too. Same goes for almost every other hyper-growth company in the history of tech.)
Yeah, but they have no moat. They gave up on video because three separate Chinese companies were kicking their ass (and for cheaper). Google has a better image model in the majority of cases. Much faster, too. Claude Opus and Fable are like a billion times better. It's not even funny. Codex can't do Rust at all. What does that leave them? Ads in ChatGPT? I've started to just rely on Google search blended with Gemini…
These numbers show that OpenAI is boned. They have no path to profitability and if they raise prices or cut services they will strangle their golden goose. They could have existed indefinitely as a service layer that was reliant on other companies feeling charitable, like Firefox, but they also wanted to get rich.
No, they show they just need to keep growing. Not a crazy assumption.
Current investors should be left holding this shit bag, better them than retirement funds.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, they argue they shouldn't be counted as operating expenses because they are basically capex dollars. It's a completely reasonable argument. If I spend $100 million on s&m to get a bunch of customers to my saas, it's not different economically to drilling 20 oil wells at $5 million a pop.
An oil well doesn't disappear once you put it in the ground (The oil might). If the marketing and promotions and discounts stopped tomorrow, that revenue will drop.
ArsTechnica has a nice graph showing it https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/06/leaked-financial-docs-sho... And I believe this is the actual source https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/
UPDATE: Also bad news, you need to let go of all of sales and marketing and G&A. And THEN it's a 50% margin business.
OpenAI likely missed the window to have a successful IPO. A year ago, even 6 months ago, folks would have been still hypnotized by the hype and they would have pulled it off. Today too many people see a burning ship of cash and no moat to justify the burn. The story just isn’t there anymore.
I wish I could believe this but lighting giant stacks of cash on fire is, unfortunately, no longer a disqualifying event for tulip buyers.
I wouldn't bet they will have a successful IPO, but I also wouldn't bet they won't, it will be almost entirely vibes based at time of launch.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I heard from Ed Zitron that you can't really turn off "training" on these models even after they have been released because they need continuous re-training to keep up with the changes in the world and the language etc. Is this correct? if it is, can we even say that research can be turned off entirely?
it's completely false