> That's the best possible interpretation of them.

Correct. Because a less charitable interpretation will squint at their marketing spend and wonder if they are just sweeping a lot of their expenses on categories they don't belong to make their business look less bonkers to those that prefer to not ask the ugly questions.

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marcosdumay a day ago | parent [-]

That.

I'm personally on the team that think it's honest. But then they have to explain why their marketing numbers are so weird.

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therobots927 a day ago | parent [-]

I don’t know how $5B+ in marketing for OpenAI is actually possible.

To put it in perspective, that’s about the combined campaign budget of the Trump and Harris campaigns.

I would expect to be seeing a lot more openAI ads than I’m seeing right now. And they would be everywhere.

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marcosdumay 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That probably includes things like bonus for signing up or recommending people, or discounts for new users.

Also, that certainly includes a lot of money for making all of the media and management training and consulting talking about them. Teams to talk about it on social media, agreements to increase its impact on visibility algorithms...

> And they would be everywhere

How are you not seeing LLM companies ads everywhere?

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cmiles8 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

“Marketing” typically includes all the people in solutions architecture, developer advocacy, compute credits, and many other things. It’s a ton more than just advertising spend, which is often a minority of what appears on that line item. Given that it’s very plausible those sort of sums are realistic.

	▲	nunez 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		SA is sales. DevRel is usually technical marketing.

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surgical_fire a day ago | parent | prev [-]

My charitable guess is that they lump the compute expense for free users as "Marketing".

My less than charitable guess is that the leaked financials is a piece of fiction intended to make inference not look unprofitable.

	▲	therobots927 a day ago \| parent [-]
		I see what you mean. If they are using it for customer acquisition, it could fall under sales and marketing. What about retention though? Or upselling to higher tiers? I would question where they decided to draw the line… because it’s a grey area.