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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

#251
post #241

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…

$20/kg is a wild claim. A typical American semi-truck (18-wheeler) can carry between 40,000 and 45,000 pounds (20 to 22.5 tons) can travel only 160k miles (2/3 distance to the Moon) on a budget of $400k (i.e. $20/kg). Do you expect us to believe that rocket transportation would be in the ballpark of truck prices in the near future?

No I don't. The entire nature of revolutionary change is that it's something that seems unimaginable, at best a fantasy, from a distance. 5 years ago you certainly wouldn't have believed that chatbots would be writing meaningfully complex programs from plain language instructions, and posing a viable threat to various forms of cognitive employment, yet here we are. Even now that we're in that era I think many haven't entirely come to terms with what this means.

With rockets, the fundamental viability is there through full reuse, airplane style. The majority of the cost of a repeatedly reusable vessel ends up being fuel, which is around a million bucks for Starship. Add another million for refurbishing, amortizing costs, and so on and you get a baseline launch cost of around $2 million. With a payload of 100 tons, you're at $20/kg.

The major difficulty is creating a system that's fully reusable, and that's exactly what's being done with Starship. I don't know if they'll succeed to the point of $20/kg, but it's a viable possibility. And if they do succeed then everything is going to get very weird, because the economics of transport become absurd, to say nothing of the entire frontier of space suddenly becoming 100% accessible at a reasonable cost for development.

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

#252
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.)

And a JPEG was just a JPEG in 2020, but in 2021 they became a 17 billion dollar speculative market.

How "very impressive" is your NFT collection these days?

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

#253
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.)

And a JPEG was just a JPEG in 2020, but in 2021 they became a 17 billion dollar speculative market. How "very impressive" is your NFT collection these days?

NFTs were very obviously stupid. LLMs aren't.

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

#254
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a JPEG was just a JPEG in 2020, but in 2021 they became a 17 billion dollar speculative market. How "very impressive" is your NFT collection these days?

NFTs were very obviously stupid. LLMs aren't.

Your argument went from "big number good" to redefining "stupid", and you think that somehow supports your original statement?

What word would you use to describe someone that:

    - told you to put glue on pizza?
    - thinks there's 1 'r' in strawberry?
    - is incapable of stopping terminal flickering? 
    - deletes your production database?
    - bankrupts you trying to scan the entire IPv6 address space of a play network interface?
    - can only attempt to draw a bird on a bike in the most bland and unimaginative style possible yet still completely failing?
All while being given the entire US economy and polluting the only planet we have to do so?

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

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> converting all subscription customers to api customers would yield 10x boost in revenue immediately so the demand is there

If OpenAI started charging all subscription users API pricing they would lose the majority of users.

If they increase the price demand will plummet. They have no moat and there are competitors.

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

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are running 40% margins. Every dollar of inference at the margin is profitable.

I'm sure every business can pull out an area and say: this is profitable. It's a classic hide the losses a shell game. So many shills on HN today, feels sponsored.

It's 40% based on total revenue, not a subset of it.

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

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are running 40% margins, assuming the reported numbers are valid.

Can I ask what is your opinion about their core CapEx, i.e. model training? The general trend I observe is that the "shelf lives" of large language models are really short. It costs $1-10 billion to train cutting-edge models at the moment, and they only really last 6 months at best. There seems to be very little brand loyalty too. Whenever a shiny new thing comes out, people just switch over, which implies that they…

It's high, really high. But, that isn't bad. In fact... they are better of with it being extremely high. Then scale matters. They need enough revenue at high enough margins to earn a decent return on that spend, but higher is, from a competitive perspective, better.

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

#258
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not suggesting the people then sit idle. The economy can grow, services can be added, the % done by AI drops, but the raw value of it doesn't. It's just to show that the market is extremely large. Like agriculture. That market has grown significantly through time, even though it's shrunk dramatically as a % of GDP.

How can people be economically active if their jobs are eliminated from the economy? At best they job-share, and demand still collapses, just in slightly different ways. AI cannot make money as an alternative to large scale employment, because essentially all the clients of those AI businesses will see demand for their products and services collapse. AI bots don’t go to In-N-Out Burger or Disneyland. Anything else is…

Look at the history of farming. Tractors also don't go to disneyland.

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

#259
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I meant by dollar amount, not headcount.

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

#260
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NFTs were very obviously stupid. LLMs aren't.

Your argument went from "big number good" to redefining "stupid", and you think that somehow supports your original statement? What word would you use to describe someone that: - told you to put glue on pizza? - thinks there's 1 'r' in strawberry? - is incapable of stopping terminal flickering? - deletes your production database? - bankrupts you trying to scan the entire IPv6 address space of a play network interface…

If you still think models can't count the Rs in strawberry you're about a year out of date.
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