I am curious to see how this compares against where Amazon was in 2000. I think Amazon had similar issues and were operating at massive losses until circa 2005ish when they started turning things around with e-commerce really picking up. If the revenue keeps going up and losses keep going down, it may reach that inflection point in a few years. For that to happen, the cost of AI datacenter have to go down massively.
Amazon had huge capital investments that got less painful as it scaled. Amazon also focuses on cash flow vs profit. Even early on it generated a lot of cash, it just reinvested that back into the business which meant it made a “loss” on paper.
OpenAI is very different. Their “capital” expense depreciation (model development) has a really ugly depreciation curve. It’s not like building a fulfillment network that you can use for decades. That’s not sustainable for much longer. They’re simply burning cash like there’s no tomorrow. Thats only being kept afloat by the AI bubble hype, which looks very close to bursting. Absent a quick change, this will get really ugly.