I'm a simple guy and I don't understand the "sales and marketing" cost.

I don't like these products. I have several negative opinions on them. To the extent they work and there is a customer base what marketing could you /possibly/ be engaged in? Doesn't the product sort of market itself? Or another way is this a product that you can market to expand your MAUs?

It's so polarizing I can't imagine how that $5.7B is being spent.

I didn't look at the financials but the subscription product is heavily discounted relative to the API pricing and that difference could well be booked as a marketing expense. They also have a string of grant and similar initiatives (like $50M each) that could be marketing. There's a lot of stuff they could assign at least partially to marketing, and it sounds like they spend money pretty freely.

Half of the comments on this site at any given moment are from bots or shills shilling OpenAI and Anthropic. Now include Reddit, Twitter and everywhere else with a tech audience, paying for all that "organic" marketing doesn't come cheap.

I cannot consume any content anywhere without being slapped in the face with an unending stream of OpenAI ads and paid plugs. I'd guess most of that money is going directly to Google and Facebook.

I've seen physical billboards in the Portland, OR area for OpenAI, so I guess that accounts for at least part of it. Not really sure what kind of return they're getting on those but apparently they can just do whatever they want, even if they're losing money.

They need marketing because they have competition that essentially offers an identical product. Why should a consumer choose openai over anthropic or whatever else there is? The answer is not obvious.

They have a large and rapidly growing enterprise sales organization. If you want to sell to enterprises you need account executives, solutions engineers, forward deployed engineers, etc.

They are paying influencers to pretend they use LLMs, and discredit Chinese models: https://www.wired.com/story/super-pac-backed-by-openai-and-p...

>It's so polarizing I can't imagine how that $5.7B is being spent.

In every way imaginable and then more, looks like beyond the imagination :)

>I don't like these products. I have several negative opinions on them.

You're not alone, and the crowd seems to be building at the same time enthusiasts are proliferating too.

So much widespread negativity I would guess that's about what it's expected to cost to fully overcome resistance and objections. Which must be bigger than we think, they sure have more information than us.

It costs money to get influencers to set up kool-aid stands on their platforms.

I've seen lots of ads saying I should use chatgpt to plan a workout or give me recipes. Thats apparently the killer app for 95% of the population at this point.