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

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

#131

Post by nl » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 5:26 AM UTC

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #80

nl wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To expand on this slightly - startups often argue that marketing expenses should not be reported as part of cost of revenue because they are temporary and will change as they grow and the market becomes more aware of them. There are arguments for and against this - awareness is an issue for startups, but most large companies continue to market. It is true that it is fairly easy to change the amount a company spends o…

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.

Yes that capex is a fair point too.

(To explain: It's basically saying they are spending $X now to get them as a customer which will yield a lifetime value which is some multiple of $X. That's a very valid thing to do - see the whole field of cohort analysis for SAAS)

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

#132

Post by danielmarkbruce » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 5:26 AM UTC

margalabargala wrote: post #104

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#133

Post by rvz » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 5:27 AM UTC

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.

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

#134

Post by bayarearefugee » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 5:27 AM UTC

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.

> If you assume AI takes a good chunk of labor, the market is gigantic. Really really really gigantic.

But without labor the entire economy also collapses into a singularity beyond which nothing really makes sense anymore, so there's that.

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

#135

Post by arjie » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 5:27 AM UTC

Of which $30b is a non-recurring loss due to the way they do stock grants. That seems incredible. The company is going to moon on IPO.

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

#136

Post by danielmarkbruce » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 5:27 AM UTC

HlessClaudesman wrote: post #116

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they show they just need to keep growing. Not a crazy assumption.

They cannot grow indefinitely when they make a loss on every user. More growth = bigger losses. Current investors should be left holding this shit bag, better them than retirement funds.

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

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

#137

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 5:27 AM UTC

raincole wrote: post #99

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.)

> Same goes for almost every other hyper-growth company in the history of tech Except it's not true. No one lost $38.5B in a year just to 'hyper-grow' or whatever it means. Uber accumulated ~$30B loss over a decade . Edit: I read it wrong. The loss was mostly caused by one-time event[0]: > Before OpenAI’s switch late last year to become a public benefit corporation, investors in the company received convertible inter…

[deleted]

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

#138

Post by w29UiIm2Xz » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 5:28 AM UTC

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.

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

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

#139

Post by rvz » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 5:28 AM UTC

DoesntMatter22 wrote: post #109

cmiles8 wrote: post #85

OpenAI likely missed the window to have a successful IPO. A year ago, even 6 months ago, folks would have been still hypnotized by the hype and they would have pulled it off. Today too many people see a burning ship of cash and no moat to justify the burn. The story just isn’t there anymore.

Musk best move IMO was going public before anyone else and gobbling up those 85 billion. I'm sure anthropic will do the same, leaving OpenAI maybe holding the bag. We'll see.

Correct. We will have to see about the first quarterly report from them first.

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

#140

Post by bambax » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 5:28 AM UTC

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.)

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 volume".

No you don't.