Leaked OpenAI financials show $38.5B loss and compute burn • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by ZaoLahma » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 5:42 AM UTC

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.

> all the way to local models for some tasks.

I think this is the key takeaway for the future of AI. Give tech a few years to catch up and we will likely have the functionally equivalent to today's models running on consumer grade hardware. From there it will explode, where "it" is how we use and interact with computers. AI will be integrated into just about every workflow.

The business case in this future would be to sell the trained models to end users. The investment would be shifted towards the training of models and delivering updates, with revenue coming from model licenses, upgrades and cloud services for tasks that exceed the local capabilities.

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

#172

Post by freakynit » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 5:42 AM UTC

doctor_phil wrote: post #156

freakynit wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"""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?

One simple 100% effective way of control is to control the livelihoods of the dependents. UBI does exactly that by giving that control to governments(politicians), which in turn generally serve corporates interests, thegerby extending that control to them. We can already see it happening with data-centers.

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

#173

Post by godwinson__4-8 » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 5:42 AM UTC

doctor_phil wrote: post #156

freakynit wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"""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?

UBI is really one of the few positive end states. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. People against UBI really need to get over themselves unless you are part of the mega capital class its simply not in your interest to oppose. This will be hard for many software engineers who even in today's market are used to being overpaid and overvalued.

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

#174

Post by babelfish » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 5:42 AM UTC

reinitctxoffset wrote: post #144

didip wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

post your comment about Meta/Anthropic C/A listers on LinkedIn and link it here

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

#175

Post by nullbio » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 5:42 AM UTC

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?

I feel like the labs and their army of bots are responsible for spreading the "inference is subsidized" narrative. It plays right into their hand and justifies high prices and price increases. Anthropic in particular loves milking people.

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

#176

Post by zozbot234 » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 5:43 AM UTC

qwytw wrote: post #165

zozbot234 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So, just like Fable? You can shorten the thinking effort to tweak the "slow and expensive" part a little bit, but at the higher end being more meticulous than even Fable is actually a benefit.

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

#177

Post by skybrian » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 5:43 AM UTC

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…

Why should we believe that Starship launch costs will be that cheap when we don't believe Musk's other numbers? Where does that number come from? Has anyone looked into it?

It doesn't cover launch costs directly, but here's a bearish take on reusability of the second stage:

https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/how-should-we-think-about-...

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

#178

Post by watwut » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 5:43 AM UTC

jofzar wrote: post #16

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/

One of these two should be the main link tbh

The Zitrons was main link yeasterday. Most claimed it is nothing burger and Zitron bullshits, has nothing there and is annoying. Shrug.

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

#179

Post by bambax » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 5:44 AM UTC

pqtyw wrote: post #158

bambax wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe. We'll see.

Also, what are they calling "R&D" exactly? If it is training new models, which needs to be done almost constantly and means spending billions on energy and newer GPUs, then it's not really R&D, but rather operating costs.

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

#180

Post by himata4113 » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 5:44 AM UTC

willsmith72 wrote: post #152

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?

R&D cost is static, converting all subscription customers to api customers would yield 10x boost in revenue immediately so the demand is there, of course we will probably see demand expand more than that the question is if it's 10x (break even) or 20x (justifying trillion dollar evaluation.