Re:Evolving OpenAI's Structure
by mandevil on Monday May 05, 2025 @03:53PM
(#43898803)
But didn't they spend $9 billion? If I have a machine that magically turns $9 billion of investor money into $4 billion in revenue, I need to have a pretty awesome story for how in the future I am going to be making enormous piles of money to pay back that investment. If it looks like frontier models are going to be a commodity and it is not going to be winner-take-all... that's a lot harder story to tell.
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Most of that 9 billion was spent on training new models and on staff. If they stopped spending money on R&D, they would already be profitable.
Re:Evolving OpenAI's Structure
by PeterStuer on Monday May 05, 2025 @04:22PM
(#43899064)
But only if everyone else stopped improving models as well.
In this niche you can be irrellevant in months when your models drop behind.
Says literally every startup ever i.r.t. R&D/marketing/ad spend yet that's rarely reality.
In a space that moves this fast and is defined by research breakthroughs, they’d be profitable for about 5 minutes.
> If they stopped spending money on R&D, they would already be profitable.
The news that they did that would make them lose most of their revenue pretty fast.
Re:Evolving OpenAI's Structure
by JumpCrisscross on Monday May 05, 2025 @05:12PM
(#43899497)
> if they stopped spending money on R&D, they would already be profitable
OpenAI has claimed this. But Altman is a pathological liar. There are lots of ways of disguising operating costs as capital costs or R&D.