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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

#181

Post by Ekaros »

hackcasual wrote: post #150
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…

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

Best analogue we have is probably video streaming. Or maybe more so live streaming. Unless subscription based and limited time events it seems those don't do well. Twitch has lost money for how long? And most smaller players seem propped up in other ways.

So if there is real cost involved things start to look lot worse and might not be overcome. OpenAI is unlikely to be exception for me.

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

#182

Post by scottyeager »

nl wrote: post #166
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.

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…

Did you mean Sonnet and Opus?

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

#184

Post by godwinson__4-8 »

freakynit wrote: post #172
doctor_phil wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What do "corporate interests" even mean in a world with UBI and automated production?

Your fight against the data centers is misguided. All so they can be built somewhere else so what you have a few extra years of getting paid to fill out a spreadsheet or something? You're applying pressure on the wrong side of the equation.

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

#185

Post by Quothling »

NetOpWibby wrote: post #148
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.

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

Microsoft quietly won the AI race in enterprise with the addition of cowork to their copilot app. Being in the energy sector in Europe we're quite limited in what we can do because of things like NIS2 compliance. We have access to corporate AI tool though the equity fund which owns part of us, and while it allows you to create personalized agents that can run sub agents and use "skills" it's all done without any form of filesystem access. Being married to Microsoft because our IT loves that sort of thing, and having spend a decade in the public sector I sort of get why from an enterprise perspective, anyway, we have always had access to their Copilot app. Which has been so bad that it's actively turned people away from AI. Then last month we get cowork frontier, and now I'm in the process of helping everyone adopt it. Not only does it play directly into our licenses, it also has access to all the Microsoft 365 stuff, so that our HR can use it to sort applications into the categories they belong in and what not. Sure they could've had a better on-boarding system, but they don't so someone has to go through the emails and sort "financial controller" from "sheep shepherd" (yes, we have sheep on our solar plants).

Anyway I'm rambling, what Microsoft is doing with AI in enterprise is basically what they did with Teams and similar systems. They provide a platform for it which is good enough that your organisation is going to want it rather than deal with multiple vendors. Not for tech organisations, but for every other enterprise organisation it'll be so much easier to just go this way. I imagine that Anthropic is getting some sort of payment from Microsoft for Cowork, but what Cowork shows is that Microsoft can be completely model agnostic and still sell "top" AI. Especially because they've set cost on a fixed rate that I'm sure they'll increase by 25% every year.

Or do things like the fact that you need some sort of special Agent 365 license for your sysadmins to manage the admin.microsoft part of Copilot which has to do with security policies... Ask me if it was fun doing that agent by agent... It's frankly the most Microsoft thing I've ever seen.

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

#187

Post by loandbehold »

Ritewut wrote: post #51
bgirard wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SpaceX was said to be subsidized by gov contracts. Look at where that got it...

You say "... was said to be" as if it's a fairy tale. SpaceX was subsidized by gov contracts. That's just a fact.

Government contract is not a subsidy. It's a payment for a product or service provided to the government. Examples of subsidies are section 8 housing or USDA PLC. SpaceX providing launch services to the government is nothing like that.

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

#189

Post by zozbot234 »

nullbio wrote: post #162
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.

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…

> 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.

It's more efficient to do the opposite on a constrained platform. Run agents in parallel using a single model, then round-robin among models for cross-checking purposes. (The makers of local inference engines are dropping the ball by not making batched inference a first-class citizen of that workflow. It's not just useful for vLLM and SGlang.)

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

#190

Post by koe123 »

spongebobstoes wrote: post #97
backend_dev82 wrote: post #78

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

I do at least think its certainly the case they cannot stop R&D: no moat without being ahead of open-source right?
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