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A comment on How much revenue is needed to justify the current AI spend?. Parent comment

Re:How much revenue is needed to justify the current AI spend? by jcranmer on Saturday October 11, 2025 @06:55PM (#45553388)
> 2. ChatGPT has 800M weekly active users. If 10% of these users are on the paid plan, this is $19.2B/year. Adjust this value depending on what percentage of users you believe pay for ChatGPT. Sam has announced that they're processing 6B API tokens per minute, which, again depending on the model, puts their annualized API revenue between $1B-$31B.

OpenAI announced a few months ago that it had finally cracked $1B in monthly revenue (intriguingly, it did so twice, which makes me wonder how much fibbing there is in these statements).

I'll also say this: the fact that AI companies prefer to tout their usage numbers rather than their revenue numbers is a sign that their revenue numbers isn't stellar (especially given that several of the Big Tech companies have stopped reporting AI revenue as separate call-outs).

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Re:How much revenue is needed to justify the current AI spend? by 827a on Saturday October 11, 2025 @07:02PM (#45553450)
> OpenAI announced a few months ago that it had finally cracked $1B in monthly revenue (intriguingly, it did so twice, which makes me wonder how much fibbing there is in these statements).

I believe this is incorrect; as far as I've heard, an anonymous source leaked that OpenAI had hit $12B in annualized revenue a few months ago [1]. I do not personally put any weight in leaks, and prefer to operate on data that has been officially announced.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-hits-12-billion-annu...

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Re:How much revenue is needed to justify the current AI spend? by jcranmer on Saturday October 11, 2025 @07:08PM (#45553518)
If you want officially announced data, OpenAI made $4.3 billion in the first half of this year.
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Re:How much revenue is needed to justify the current AI spend? by 827a on Saturday October 11, 2025 @07:11PM (#45553547)
Also not official numbers my brother [1]. Check your sources.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/openais-first-half-revenu...

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Re:How much revenue is needed to justify the current AI spend? by jcranmer on Saturday October 11, 2025 @07:14PM (#45553563)
"Reported to shareholders" is a whole heck of a lot more accurate than some person on the internet playing numerology to turn similarly sketchily-sourced user numbers into revenue numbers.
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Re:How much revenue is needed to justify the current AI spend? by 827a on Saturday October 11, 2025 @07:27PM (#45553666)
That number was not reported as "reported to shareholders". Again, its astounding how wrong you keep getting this. It was leaked to The Information by an anonymous source who claimed to be a shareholder who received this financial disclosure.

Its all about citation. Everyone who read my numerology estimations above knew that they were estimations. You, on the other hand, lied about two different leaks of OpenAI's revenue numbers as being "official".

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