Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Leaked OpenAI financials show $38.5B loss and compute burn

runtimewire.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 278 posts

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

#141

Post by reinitctxoffset »

ElFitz wrote: post #124
reinitctxoffset wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic has a durable advantage that OpenAI does not, as much as they choose to squander it to pump the numbers. 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 be…

> Claude Code is the cancer that will kill the patient, Boris is the the Kardashian version of Karpathy, with less business sense. I am not sure I understand.

Using a multi-trillion parameter softmax attention transformer to parse nested delimiters is a perverse thing to do. It is hard to imagine a sillier way to boil the oceans than feeding JSON to an LLM, a task that a pushdown automata from the 1960s effortlessly did on a PDP-X.

The API business throws a massive model that by definition can't be inferred efficiently because nothing can across 4 different compute substates, at a problem that DSv4 nails at or near 100% while leaving most of the actual unique value of Claude on the table.

Claude should be in your house and car and your kid's classroom and shit.

Having it write tail -n5?

That's because Anthropic's A-Team is Meta's C-Team. Hell, I fired some of their stars myself.

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

#142

Post by Bolwin »

reinitctxoffset wrote: post #114
nl wrote: post #8

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.

Anthropic has a durable advantage that OpenAI does not, as much as they choose to squander it to pump the numbers. 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 be…

None of them even expose thinking anymore. You're seeing a summary

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

#143

Post by ai_slop_hater »

grey-area wrote: post #130
cmiles8 wrote: post #85

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.

SpaceX IPO shows that the mania is alive and well. The big AI IPOs this year will mark the high point in the bubble IMO, with retail FOMO ensuring that they pop like SpaceX has. After that I expect them to crater, just like all those Spacs and Blockchain startups.

What do you mean spacex has? Did spacex stock go down?

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

#144

Post by reinitctxoffset »

didip wrote: post #128
reinitctxoffset wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic has a durable advantage that OpenAI does not, as much as they choose to squander it to pump the numbers. 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 be…

Is this AI bot? So annoying that bots can join in HN conversations.

No it isn't, and I'm happy to prove it any way you like. If you decline that offer please retract the claim.

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

#145

Post by LeFantome »

rvz wrote: post #133
nl wrote: post #8

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.

Imagine still saying this after open weight models being released everywhere and the likes of DeepSeek keeping their prices at the lowest possible for more than good enough intelligence that even Microsoft is migrating to deploy DeepSeek's models.

Looking forward to GLM-5.2 in OpenCode.

But a lot of other people are going to happily shell out for Opus 4.8 at way higher prices.

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

#146

Post by raincole »

cmiles8 wrote: post #85

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.

After reading Financial Times and Ed Zitron's articles[0][1], I've reached the opposite conclusion. OpenAI's situation healthier than what the outsiders once believed:

> Revenue: $13.07 billion

> Cost of Revenue: $7.5 billion

In other words generating tokens is actually a profitable business even for the frontier models. It's best to IPO when it's the case.

[0]: https://www.ft.com/content/e15b0d7e-ff6b-4f16-ba7a-4068feddb... [1]: https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/

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

#147

Post by reinitctxoffset »

Bolwin wrote: post #142
reinitctxoffset wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic has a durable advantage that OpenAI does not, as much as they choose to squander it to pump the numbers. 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 be…

None of them even expose thinking anymore. You're seeing a summary

I am happy to show you a thinking trace from 4.8 without even opening the web tools.

The legibility of thinking traces has gone down, but mostly this nets out to spilling more XML because their website is a vibecoded heap

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

#148

Post by NetOpWibby »

rvz wrote: post #133
nl wrote: post #8

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.

Imagine still saying this after open weight models being released everywhere and the likes of DeepSeek keeping their prices at the lowest possible for more than good enough intelligence that even Microsoft is migrating to deploy DeepSeek's models.

Microsoft has been dead last at everything for decades, so that point isn't surprising.

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

#149

Post by himata4113 »

slow_typist wrote: post #77
himata4113 wrote: post #13

so they could stop development and research right now and be profitable, considering that gpt 5.5 is often regarded as one of the best models for writing code this is looking pretty good. Let's take another example: If OpenAI grows to 10 times their current size and continue spending the same amount on research and development they would be profitable today without any other changes to their organizational structure.…

The moment they‘d stop development would put marketing and sales in a very dire position, regardless of how good gpt 5.5 is.

Anthropic claimed themselves that AI progress will slow down effectively calling fable the pinicle of what we can do today which is true, they've trained the largest possible model with the most advanced system from nvidia. GPT 5.5 would likely last a year or two because I don't see chinese labs investing that many billions in compute since at the end of the day it's a compute x intelligence graph and the only way to catch up is to quite litereally spend more money, that's realistically where the moat is. Of course distilling techniques have been proved to be very powerful, but I am still not convinced they're able to replicate the nuanced behavior these models exhibit. GLM 5.2 will be interesting to see as it is the most promising model that might blow up the entire argument of spending billions in training.

That said this is obviously not a strategy, but rather an observation that this is not a flawed, impossible concept.

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

#150

Post by hackcasual »

bambax wrote: post #140
simonw wrote: post #19

"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.)

AI doesn't work like the rest of the tech industry. The cost of selling another license for a software program is approximately zero. In the case of AI the marginal cost of the next token is not zero, and is in fact probably not going down much with volume, if at all. So I'm not sure one can argue that scale will solve everything. It's very much like the old adage "we lose money on every sale, but make it up in volum…

It's wild to think how efficient Internet services were prior to AI. The most expensive thing would probably have been something like encoding video. Now you've a substantial portion of a rack dedicated to a user in the case of something like fable
Post reply on HN