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OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B

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Re: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B

#211

Post by ignoramous »

marcosdumay wrote: post #197

So... 50% operational costs and about $100 spent on sales for each paying customer. If they manage to keep those customers for several years without more sales, that bit looks like a normal "high-touch" business. They shouldn't look like a "high-touch" business, but their unitary numbers look way better than I expected. They just need to grow some 10 times to star making a profit... Maybe 100 to cover the opportunity…

> just a matter of finding 5 billion people willing to pay US prices

This is how you know ads are inevitable. YouTube is probably a good indicator of how BigLabs will operate for free users.

Re: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B

#212

Post by theturtletalks »

uberduper wrote: post #208
542458 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I have a different $20 plan than everyone else. I have no problem hitting my 5 hour and weekly limits. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great deal compared to API pricing, but it’s a far cry from “unlimited”.

I get about 20 minutes of work from my 5h limit with the $20 plan. It wouldn't bother me as much if codex would continue after the token bucket refills instead of waiting for me to show up and tell it to continue. I don't jump to the $100 plan because I would be in the exact same situation.

Harness matters in this. Using the Codex sub with Hermes eats tokens like nothing. Using it with Pi is much less but you don’t get the long term memory. When you were able to use the Claude subscription with Pi, I barely hit the 5hr limit. When they stopped allowing that, CC harness just chews thru tokens.

Re: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B

#213

Post by jmalicki »

marcosdumay wrote: post #197

So... 50% operational costs and about $100 spent on sales for each paying customer. If they manage to keep those customers for several years without more sales, that bit looks like a normal "high-touch" business. They shouldn't look like a "high-touch" business, but their unitary numbers look way better than I expected. They just need to grow some 10 times to star making a profit... Maybe 100 to cover the opportunity…

The win for something like OpenAI isn't getting a ton of customers to pay $10-100/mo.

It's getting businesses to pay $2k/mo or more per professional employee, like a lot of Anthropic customers.

Anthropic is ahead of them there, but that is how they win.

Re: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B

#214

Post by ignoramous »

margalabargala wrote: post #189
natas wrote: post #143

Napkin maths. Alphabet: ~$4.5T value / ~$403B revenue ≈ 11× revenue Microsoft: ~$2.9T value / ~$282B revenue ≈ 10× revenue OpenAI: ~$850B value / ~$13B revenue ≈ 65× revenue Can someone explains that logic?

Let's say Company 1 has $1B revenue and has grown 5x in the last year, and 20x the last 2 years.. Let's say Company 2 has $1B revenue and that's the same as it was last year and the year before. Should these companies be valued the same?

> Should these companies be valued the same

By who? Public money is looking for dividends (profits) not growth?

Re: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B

#215

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

apatheticonion wrote: post #209

Seeing that R&D costs are the lion's share, I wonder if we are at a point where the focus can shift to improving the cost of inference. Unless we are genuinely pushing to find AGI, at which point nothing matters, LLMs in their current form don't replace knowledge workers but are an effective force multiplier. How good is enough? For instance, I pay about $1-2 a month for DeepSeek. It's not as sophisticated as Claude,…

Even if you discount superhuman AI (which I would emphasize that frontier researchers do not discount and expect to see soon) think it’s still hard to have enough confidence that the ground is solid. Someone in 2024 trying to go down this route would have invested a lot of now-pointless effort into prompt engineering.

Re: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B

#216

Post by amluto »

These numbers seem insufficiently detailed to really evaluate anything. They’re had $13bn in gross revenue in 2025, and they cost of that revenue was $7.5bn. Both are growing fast (we assume) and the ratio ought to stay roughly constant.

But: how are they calculating the cost of revenue? Do they have rapidly depreciating assets that are also needed to produce that revenue? (Starlink has this issue.) Will their cost per arithmetic operation for inference rise or fall? (Anthropic is paying xAI an absolutely insane amount to lease GPUs. They must be betting that they will not need to repeat that.) Is a large portion of the cost allocated to R&D actually being used to support their revenue?

I certainly believe that the cost of inference can be plenty low for them to make a profit, but a more granular breakdown would make it easier to evaluate.

Re: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B

#217

Post by throwaway85825 »

Gigachad wrote: post #136
sunsunsunsun wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They need marketing because they have competition that essentially offers an identical product. Why should a consumer choose openai over anthropic or whatever else there is? The answer is not obvious.

OpenAI will make fully autonomous killing machines while Anthropic wont.

Land mines are my favorite fully autonomous killing machine. They've also been around for a while.

Re: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B

#218

Post by eranation »

542458 wrote: post #196
eranation wrote: post #191

Is this surprising to anyone? I thought that was a given. I'm getting de-facto unlimited use of a model more expensive than Opus 4.8 for $20 a month.

I feel like I have a different $20 plan than everyone else. I have no problem hitting my 5 hour and weekly limits. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great deal compared to API pricing, but it’s a far cry from “unlimited”.

Interesting. I'm mostly using Claude, so perhaps I'm not nearing the limits, but I do use Codex (for coding and reviews occasionally) and use chatgpt for second opinion many times, including "pro" research. Never got to my limits. But again, not my main go to tool.

Re: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B

#219

Post by eranation »

perching_aix wrote: post #202
eranation wrote: post #191

Is this surprising to anyone? I thought that was a given. I'm getting de-facto unlimited use of a model more expensive than Opus 4.8 for $20 a month.

> de-facto unlimited (...) for $20 a month Would love to hear some details on that one... Or was that a typo and you meant the $200/mo plan instead maybe? That one I could believe, assuming no or frugal subagent use that is.

Copying my other reply.

> Interesting. I'm mostly using Claude, so perhaps I'm not nearing the limits, but I do use Codex (for coding and reviews occasionally) and use chatgpt for second opinion many times, including "pro" research. Never got to my limits. But again, not my main go to tool.

Re: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B

#220

Post by GHanku »

JimTheMan wrote: post #188
fsuts wrote: post #175

”The company reports over 900 million weekly active users of ChatGPT, though only about 50 million of those are paid subscribers.” With so many free models available the ai companies are going to struggle to convert active free users to paid.

None of the free models offer anything even remotely close to the output you can get on a relatively inexpensive model. I think that AI is going to become just another utility people pay to stay relevant. Same as their internet, electricity or gas.

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