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Leaked OpenAI financials show $38.5B loss and compute burn

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

#151

Post by JMiao »

somenameforme wrote: post #76
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.

The market is pricing in the potential for future revolutionary shifts which seem fairly likely. For instance if there ends up being substantial labor disruption due to LLMs then the economy as we know it is going to end up being reshaped in ways that are difficult to imagine beyond the fact that the LLM providers would likely play a critical role in it. Similarly, SpaceX has already brought the cost of getting thing…

i am not ready for our weyland-yutani overlords

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

#152

Post by willsmith72 »

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.…

but why is that a feasible hypothetical?

Just 10x your revenue without increasing R&D cost? where's this 1 magic trick and why can't every company just use it?

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

#153

Post by reinitctxoffset »

locusofself wrote: post #123
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…

You lost me in the last sentence there. What do you mean?

You and another commenter asked the same question at the same time, it's more honest to link the one reply than to paste it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48566097

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

#154

Post by tobyhinloopen »

reinitctxoffset wrote: post #141
ElFitz wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 substat…

You know what’s worse (less efficient) at parsing and writing code than LLMs?

Humans.

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

#155

Post by jacobgold »

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.)

Annual revenue of $13 billion per year puts them on par with Apple's AirPods revenue, which places them in U.S. Fortune 500.

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

#156

Post by doctor_phil »

freakynit wrote: post #127
somenameforme wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market is pricing in the potential for future revolutionary shifts which seem fairly likely. For instance if there ends up being substantial labor disruption due to LLMs then the economy as we know it is going to end up being reshaped in ways that are difficult to imagine beyond the fact that the LLM providers would likely play a critical role in it. Similarly, SpaceX has already brought the cost of getting thing…

"""For instance if there ends up being substantial labor disruption due to LLMs" "" .. who are they gonna sell to if people don't even have money to buy? We live in circular economy... everyone's dependent on someone or the other... you take one leg out of this, and the whole thing stops. UBI won't work either because it will lead to runaway inflation and extreme levels of invasive control over people's lives and wha…

> UBI won't work either because it will lead to [...] extreme levels of invasive control over people's lives and what they can and cannot do

I've never heard this before. I thought UBI would be very freeing and without much control. If it is universal then there needs to be no control of who gets it or not. What am I missing?

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

#157

Post by quietfox »

freakynit wrote: post #127
somenameforme wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market is pricing in the potential for future revolutionary shifts which seem fairly likely. For instance if there ends up being substantial labor disruption due to LLMs then the economy as we know it is going to end up being reshaped in ways that are difficult to imagine beyond the fact that the LLM providers would likely play a critical role in it. Similarly, SpaceX has already brought the cost of getting thing…

"""For instance if there ends up being substantial labor disruption due to LLMs" "" .. who are they gonna sell to if people don't even have money to buy? We live in circular economy... everyone's dependent on someone or the other... you take one leg out of this, and the whole thing stops. UBI won't work either because it will lead to runaway inflation and extreme levels of invasive control over people's lives and wha…

I’ve always been wondering how they are actually planning this scenario. If they cut human labor on a massive scale due to AI, consumption is about to drop heavily. AI doesn’t pay healthcare insurance or taxes, it doesn’t buy groceries or cars or gas and it doesn’t rent apartments. How do people imagine to compensate that?

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

#158

Post by pqtyw »

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…

But there is no indication they are losing money on tokens when R&D and other expenses are factored out? The margins on API are likely very high so the higher the volume the more likely they will be able to cover the other mostly fixed costs.

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

#159

Post by Retric »

simonw wrote: post #102
Retric wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That argument supports any levels of losses, however I also think it’s rather misleading. Growth means some inefficiencies, but their expenses are largely around commodities like electricity and data centers not a sudden army of salespeople. They also got 150M 11 years ago and 1 billion 7 year ago, they where quite large in 2022. Basically you don’t get better at writing checks to your local utility which limits how…

> They also got 150M 11 years ago and 1 billion 7 year ago, they where quite large in 2022. I had to look that up, you're talking about investment there, not earned revenue. The 150M was their initial funding (actually 130M I think https://www.clay.com/dossier/openai-funding ) The 1B was from Microsoft in 2019: https://openai.com/index/microsoft-invests-in-and-partners-w... In 2022 they only had 335 employees (accord…

We don’t disagree with the underlying facts.

That said, in many ways 335 employees is the midpoint between 3 employees and 30,000 employees. The CEO can’t keep track of everyone’s names and what they’re doing, you need layers of management, HR, etc. It’s not really a simple exponential function but 335 to 336 is way more automated than going from 3 to 4.

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