[runako]

That last part is a key differentiator between Stripe and OpenAI.

Stripe had high variable costs (staff, COGS of pass-through processing fees) but low fixed costs. OpenAI has enormous fixed (pre-revenue!) costs alongside high variable costs (staff of AI engineers, inference).

Financially, OpenAI looks more like one of the EV startups like Tesla or Rivian than it does a company like Stripe. And where Stripe was competing with relatively stodgy financial institutions, OpenAI is competing with the very biggest, richest companies in the world.

[vostrocity]

What are OpenAI's enormous fixed costs if not the staff?

[runako]

Models cost a ton of money to train. GPT-4 training was > $100m. GPT-5 training is estimated to be order of $1B-$2B. This is in the same ballpark as Tesla allocated to get the Fremont facility online.

It is likely training generations beyond GPT-5 will cost still more.

These are essentially fixed costs as OpenAI has to pay to train the model whether or not anyone ever uses it.