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by dgellow·7d ago·view on hn ↗
I don’t think you understand how bad OpenAI economics are. The company is burning billions just to operate. They cannot stop the training treadmill due to competitive pressure, but assuming they do that would only reduce their expanses, not increase their revenue. They would still be in the negative. We are talking about a company that has more than >$750B of infrastructure expenditure commitment for 2030.

The number of users they have checking weekly is irrelevant, most of them are free users, unless they find a way to make money from them, but their ads business has been a flop so far.

For context: Uber losses were $12B over 5 years. AWS was $5B invested over 7y.

OpenAI is projected to lose more than $14B just this year!!!

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> Uber losses were $12B over 5 years.

Uber burned through roughly $32 billion in cumulative losses before reaching sustained profitability.

The rough timeline:

- Founded 2009, and lost money every year for about 14 years

- Biggest single-year losses: ~$8.5 billion in 2019 (the IPO year) and ~$9.1 billion in 2022

- 2023 was its first full year of net profitability, earning about $1.9 billion

- Uber has a market cap of $153bn as of today (at a P/E of 16.5)

OpenAI has received substantially more funding than Uber, so its losses will be substantially higher (spending investor money shows up as a loss on your P&L), but again that doesn't mean anything in and of itself.