this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2026
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417
OpenAI made $13 billion in 2025 and lost $21 billion doing it (www.techspot.com)
submitted 2 days ago by sanitation@lemmy.today to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] ironycanal@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

A lot of people are gonna give openaishit over this, but the old cliché is true; gotta spend money to lose money.

At a personal scale you can just light a few bills on fire, and you're good. Maybe even gamble away a home or something if you're filthy rich.

But at this scale that just doesn't work. Burning this amount of money takes infrastructure, trucks, roads, labor, and facilities. Otherwise the poor's might take some of it.

Can you imagine what those people would spend this kind of money on?

[–] abc@suppo.fi 5 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

That's a weird way of saying that they had a net loss of $8 billion. Are you trying to imply that this is somehow extraordinary for a growth company? How do you figure that?

[–] billwashere@lemmy.world 12 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Then it didn’t make 13 billion….. and it didn’t lose 21 billion.

It lost 8 billion. That’s how math works.

[–] percent@infosec.pub 8 points 8 hours ago

You're not wrong, but neither is the title. That's just how business accounting works. Ultimately, it's still the same conclusion ($8 billion loss)

[–] osanna@lemmy.vg 3 points 6 hours ago

Yep, defo not a bubble.

[–] Malyca@lemmy.zip 6 points 10 hours ago

Vibe stocks

[–] Tikiporch@lemmy.world 14 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

So they lost $8b.

[–] green_goglin@thelemmy.club 3 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Altman is such a miserable cunt.

[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 3 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

he pretty much is created by thiel, so yes he is. since ALtman met his husband at one of thiels "pool" parties. just like how he plucked vance out of obscurity from yale. he does love his gay puppets.

[–] green_goglin@thelemmy.club 1 points 26 minutes ago

indeed

[–] tatterdemalion@programming.dev 2 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

What's their op ex though? I feel like there must be a sizable portion of that which isn't actually necessary to keep the service up.

[–] megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)

So the the operating expense was greater than their revenue from operations by about 2, but it seems like they’re minimizing it by hiding the cost of some of the compute inside marketing and training costs. This is something that a few AI companies in China have been caught doing to make it seem like they’re doing better than they are. So they could be incinerating money at an even faster rate than they just admitted.

[–] DeadDigger@lemmy.zip 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

And in R&D

[–] megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 hours ago

Yah, given that “training models” doesn’t stop when the model is finished and released. Like, a released model needs to be continuously tweaked to keep it up to date or to deal with problems that have occurred. Even if that’s not literally tokens used by customers, it is compute being used to provide service to customers.

And that’s just assuming that they’re not just hiding some compute costs used to service customer demand inside the R&D budget. “Oh, you see, this pool of customers are being served with an experimental version, so any compute here is actually R&D, any API fees or subscription payments made by them of course get counted towards normal revenue.”

[–] HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 10 points 1 day ago

Bah that's baby numbers compared to what "private space" will accomplish!

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