> Last year, OpenAI expected about $5 billion in losses on $3.7 billion in revenue. OpenAI’s annual recurring revenue is now on track to pass $20 billion this year, but the company is still losing money.
> “As long as we’re on this very distinct curve of the model getting better and better, I think the rational thing to do is to just be willing to run the loss for quite a while,” Altman told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in an interview Friday following the release of GPT-5.
Selling compute for less than it cost you will have as much revenue as you want to pay for.
Anthropic founder described it as: if each model were a company, they be hugely profitable. It looks bad since when the model you trained in 2024 is generating net positive revenue, you’re also training a more expensive model for 2025 that won’t generate revenue until then. So currently, they’re always burning more cash than they’re bringing in, under the expectation that every model will increase revenue even more. Who knows how long that lasts, but it’s working so far.
Paraphrase is from the podcast he was in with the stripe founder, cheeky pints I think
The problem for OpenAI and the difference with other FAANGs is that they don’t own the internet. Other companies are able to replicate their product, which prevents them from fully realizing profits.
Google doesn’t have this problem. They only run Google ads in their search results. Same thing for Facebook.
If I have the numbers right, OpenAI will burn more money this year alone than all of those prior companies did in their entire profitless phase of existence.
