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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

#161

Post by necovek »

moi2388 wrote: post #107
anshumankmr wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what PEOPLE are saying IT is very difficult to sustain that level of growth.

Of course it is. But stocks aren’t a measure of current profitability. It’s a bet on future profits. How many serious, large AI players are there? Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and who else exactly? At least one of them will probably win. And winning here means billing almost all companies for AI and automation, consumers, perhaps robotics and research.. and that potential earning is massive. So yes, I will pay 10 times…

I believe a more likely outcome is that neither one of them outright "wins", and they get joined by other players like xAI, DeepSeek, Qwen, Mystral, Llama even...

That should make it hard to bank in on future growth with any single AI company: what I believe is happening is investors jumping in on the short term gains train.

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

#162

Post by nullbio »

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.

I think OpenAI will still maintain the lead for at least another few years.

The cost of hardware still needs to dramatically drop for open-weight models to be viable for local usage. Even with the release of things like Nvidia DGX Spark and Ryzen AI Halo, you'd likely want a few of them to run agents in parallel.

Sure, you can use cloud hosted variants of models like DeepSeek etc at API rates, but subscriptions still come out on top for bulk usage. GPT is already tightly integrated into peoples workflows, has wide adoption, has good tooling for developers, etc.

Plus there's nothing stopping them from competing on a price level if they really feel the need. It just means they might burn more cash in the short term.

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

#163

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#164

Post by datadrivenangel »

_spduchamp wrote: post #31
chillfox wrote: post #3

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/

From the Ars Technica article... OpenAI’s headline “net loss” number of just over $5 billion in 2024 ballooned to nearly $39 billion in 2025. But the 2025 number includes a significant accounting charge related to investor valuations that shifted amid the company’s 2025 conversion to a for-profit structure. The Financial Times cites “a person familiar with the matter” in reporting that this non-recurring charge was a…

They promised the former investors $30b in equity, which is like taking a loan accounting wise.

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

#165

Post by qwytw »

zozbot234 wrote: post #126
echelon wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Opus 4.8 is quite weak. And GPT-Pro is very much available unlike Fable, it's just not hooked up to the Codex harness yet.

Will it be? It's so obscenely slow and expensive and its not obvious it could provide a lot of value for non highly specialized tasks.

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

#166

Post by nl »

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.

I use DeepSeek. I'm very familiar with open models. I run a popular benchmark to check their progress.

DeepSeek is somewhere between Sonnet and Opus in capability, for much lower price.

Their $0.87 per million output tokens is one of the few API offerings that is probably subsidized (the break-even price is probably around $2 judging by[1])

I think Anthropic and OpenAI's margins will erode some over time. But I think they are very profitable now on the API prices they are charging, and their margins will remain healthy.

Put it like this: AWS is a very expensive way of getting compute, and there are numerous competitors that are much cheaper.And yet AWS is very profitable.

[1] https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro#providers

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

#167

Post by necovek »

ted_dunning wrote: post #91
JSR_FDED wrote: post #50

Why would revenue continue to grow at this rate? Enterprises are becoming increasingly aware that the best models can be used for planning and then cheaper models for execution - all the way to local models for some tasks. Add in increasing competition from Chinese models… I’m not convinced this revenue growth is guaranteed.

Add in the fact that they claim 900 million weekly uniques. Pretending the growth and cost rates compound as described in the article, they will need to generate about 100x current revenue to growth out of their current hole. That sort of implies that they will have 10x the entire world's population as weekly uniques at that time. That seems unlikely.

They could have 2x customers spend 50x as much money too.

I think it's more about contrasting it with world economy as a whole for a reality check.

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

#168

Post by reinitctxoffset »

tobyhinloopen wrote: post #154
reinitctxoffset wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[dead]

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

#169

Post by loandbehold »

backend_dev82 wrote: post #112
spongebobstoes wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's completely false

So model drift is not really a thing?

You don't need to retrain model from scratch to add small of additional knowledge like recent events.

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

#170

Post by nl »

w29UiIm2Xz wrote: post #138
rvz wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's the adage, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it

My salary is in no way dependent on OpenAI or Anthropic (in fact I could probably get more money if we switched to using open models and they were just as capable).
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