21–27 of 27 posts
- OpenAI claims to have spent $2.5 billion on inference in H1 of 2025, report claims it actually spent $5.02 billion
- OpenAI claims to have made $3.7 billion in revenues in 2024, report claims it actually made $2.469 billion
- OpenAI claims to have made $4.3 billion in revenues in H1 of 2025, report claims it actually made $2.273 billion
There's a story here that's in some ways bigger than OpenAI or Anthropic's finances. Someone is leaking very sensitive and private financial information to Ed. They're clearly getting these numbers from somewhere and given the monthly breakdowns Ed posted previously for Anthropic, they are likely coming from a billing dashboard of some kind inside the big clouds. It's not very likely the leaks are coming from inside the AI labs themselves because of how cloud specific and incomplete they are.
For a big cloud to have a rogue insider like this is huge. It's really rare for big tech firms to leak private data and this report suggests MS or whoever has this problem hasn't been able to find the leaker, which is amazing. These numbers can't be that widely distributed surely? If companies like OpenAI aren't safe from leaks then nobody is.
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The problem with shorts is that bubbles can expand well beyond rationality. Cash or bonds is what I am doing.
That's not a problem at all, you just roll some of your bull market gains into close dated ATM puts periodically. If the market is sideways sell calls.
Thanks for sharing! It's pretty rare to see a balanced take from Ed Zitron. > I also cannot reconcile these numbers with the reporting that OpenAI will have a cash burn of $9 billion in CY2025. On inference alone, OpenAI has already spent $8.67 billion through Q3 CY2025. This is insane.
How are you understanding the word 'balanced'? Do you mean _tone_, or something? Like, this is unusually dry and non-grumpy for Ed, but it's if anything more critical than his normal output.
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Bitcoin miners have also been sitting on the sidelines waiting for this too. Compute is a hard resource, inextricably linked to money, time, and energy. The math doesn't work in Sam's favor, no matter how much smoke he blows up your ass. It's going to be interesting when all these GPUs are repurposed to mine Bitcoin, and people try to forget falling for the hysteria that somehow you can arrive at AGI from a glorified…
Is there any difference in a GPU that's good at bitcoin mining versus one that's good for AI work? Or to ask another way is all the compute being built-out now able to be repurposed for mining?
No GPU is good for bitcoin mining; that's all been ASICs for a long time. Even before anyone got around to making ASICs for it, FPGA-based designs had displaced GPU mining. Bitcoin mining is very, very simple.
Some altcoins use GPUs.
Depends if these numbers are counting the free Azure credits that Microsoft invested in them. There's a story here that's in some ways bigger than OpenAI or Anthropic's finances. Someone is leaking very sensitive and private financial information to Ed. They're clearly getting these numbers from somewhere and given the monthly breakdowns Ed posted previously for Anthropic, they are likely coming from a billing dashbo…