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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

#191

Post by nl »

vkou wrote: post #100
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they argue they shouldn't be counted as operating expenses because they are basically capex dollars. It's a completely reasonable argument. If I spend $100 million on s&m to get a bunch of customers to my saas, it's not different economically to drilling 20 oil wells at $5 million a pop.

An oil well doesn't disappear once you put it in the ground (The oil might). If the marketing and promotions and discounts stopped tomorrow, that revenue will drop.

Page 6 of Google's 10K statement to the SEC[1] they are separate items. The line items are:

Cost of revenues Research and development Sales and marketing General and administrative

Take it up with the SEC I guess?

[1] https://s206.q4cdn.com/479360582/files/doc_financials/2026/q...

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

#192

Post by Daviey »

LeFantome wrote: post #145
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.

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.

Been using GLM-5.2 in OpenCode since Saturday, what are you waiting for?

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

#193

Post by Razengan »

echelon wrote: post #86
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.)

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…

> Google has a better image model in the majority of cases.

Not always. A couple months ago (before ChatGPT Images 2) I tried various prompts on both Google's Nano Banana or whatever and ChatGPT.

"Capybara riding a tricycle. It has 7 tentacles instead of legs"

Google got the number of tentacles completely wrong: https://i.postimg.cc/nzY30y7X/Capybara-Gemini-Nano.png

and after some additions like spotted fur and multicolored tentacles, it was no contest:

ChatGPT: https://i.postimg.cc/02c2LrxV/Capybara-Chat-GPT-before-Image... (although there's still kinda 1 extra tentacle)

And Google still seems to have that odd choice of a European plaza/square/cobblestone street background for everything.

> Claude Opus and Fable are like a billion times better.

NOT at ALL: https://i.imgur.com/jYawPDY.png

Subscribed to Claude Opus for 2 months, with a few months gap between subscriptions to try different versions.

The UX/UI around Anthropic's products was excruciatingly annoying, right from the payment process, and Claude's AI was often hilariously dumb and "trying too hard", constantly full of "oops, you're right" backtracking and often borderline dangerous.

I tried Claude and ChatGPT Codex side by side on some tasks, with the same prompts. Each time, my confidence in Claude fell.

I've been subscribed to the $20 ChatGPT plan for more than 1 year, and this month, I am trying the $100 plan for 1 month.

ChatGPT Codex has been actually helpful and made me more productive enough that I can't imagine going back to coding without it.

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

#194

Post by general1465 »

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?

> What am I missing?

Nothing, it is nonsense. UBI is just expanded social welfare in Europe. There are some checks that you are not abusing social welfare (i.e. living in a huge house while taking housing subsidies) but with UBI these checks are nonsensical from that first letter U = Universal. There are no checks by default.

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

#195

Post by SyneRyder »

LeFantome wrote: post #145
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.

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.

I think it's out now - or do you mean as part of the Zen subscription?

The API GLM 5.2 launched last night with several providers on OpenRouter. I had a short conversation, didn't get to test much, but initial impressions "the vibes were good".

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

#197

Post by Ritewut »

loandbehold wrote: post #187
Ritewut wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Distinction without a difference as it pertains to the conversation. Most of the money SpaceX received from the government was under the COTS program where NASA gave SpaceX money to develop a product and then NASA would become a customer of that product. It is as close as you can get to a technical subsidy without it being technically a subsidy.

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

#198

Post by dofm »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #72
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.

global gdp is over 100 trillion. Something like 50-60% is paid to labor. If you assume AI takes a good chunk of labor, the market is gigantic. Really really really gigantic.

AI bots don’t buy consumer goods and other services.

If people don’t get work they stop buying things. If people don’t buy things, companies don’t make money. If companies don’t make money they won’t buy — or have a reason to buy —- AI companies’ services.

You cannot eliminate a significant chunk of labour cost without causing demand collapse. People saying that there is money in eliminating labour costs at that scale are not doing the whole of the calculation.

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

#199

Post by nl »

scottyeager wrote: post #182
nl wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, edited, thanks.

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

#200

Post by dofm »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #132
margalabargala wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most labor by any measurement is not knowledge work like software engineering.

If by most, you literally mean > 50%, sure. But I've heard it quoted that knowledge work in advanced economies is something like 40%. So, we are still talking extremely large numbers.

They are also the higher earners who buy more of the things.

Henry Ford said he needed to pay his workers enough that they could afford his cars.

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