If OpenAI continues on their current revenue growth trajectory, they should be larger than AWS by 2027. Burning 2x revenue to grow that fast is not really a concern beyond your continued ability to attract financing. Given the trajectory of inference cost, it unlikely that they would fail to reach profitability.

The big question would be how much of this revenue is unjustifiably circular, and how much of it is extractable - but those are questions for when the growth slows. Im certain every supplier has ways to back out of these commitments if the finances look shaky.

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hiq 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Given the trajectory of inference cost, it unlikely that they would fail to reach profitability.

Is there evidence that their revenues are growing faster than their costs?

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versteegen 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

The place to go for those numbers is https://epoch.ai/data/ai-companies

Very little data about expenses, but it looks like they may be growing a little slower (3-4x a year) than revenue. Which makes sense because inference and training get more efficient over time.

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lumost 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

We don't have evidence one way or the other. But from the public statements the idea that they lose roughly their revenue seems constant over time. It's possible that that is simply a psychological barrier for investors. Meaning they grow their losses at roughly 2x their revenue growth rate.

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vel0city 3 days ago | parent [-]

> Given the trajectory of inference cost, it unlikely that they would fail to reach profitability.

> We don't have evidence one way or the other

I don't see how both of these things can be true. How can we know something to be likely or unlikely if we have no evidence of how things are?

If we don't have any evidence they're moving towards profitability, how is it likely they will become profitable?

	▲	lumost a day ago \| parent [-]
		Growing businesses tend to consume capital. How much capital is appropriate to burn is subjective, but there are good baselines from other industries and internal business justifications. As tech companies burn capital through people time, it's hard to directly figure out what is true CapEx vs. unsustainable burn. You wouldn't demand that a restaurant jack prices up or shutdown in its first month of business after spending ~1 MM on a remodel to earn ~20k in the first month. You would expect that the restaurant isn't going to remodel again for 5 years and the amortized cost should be ~16k/mo (or less).

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Libidinalecon 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't know, this coming month will be the first time that my subscription is going to lapse.

I have got incredible value from ChatGPT up to this point but I have been using it less and less.

What I have mostly extracted from it is a giant list of books I need to read. A summary of the ideas of a book I haven't read is obviously not the same as reading the whole book.

Before all this there were so many areas I was curious about that ChatGPT gave me a nice surface level summary of. I now know much better what I want to focus on but I don't need more surface level summaries.

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mvdtnz 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

https://xkcd.com/605/