Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ImprobableTruth 459 days ago
If you compare with e.g. Deepseek and other hosters, you'll find that OpenAI is actually almost certainly charging very high margins (Deepseek has an 80% profit margin and they're 10x cheaper than openai).

The training/R&D might make OpenAI burn VC cash, but this isn't comparable with companies like WeWork whose products actively burn cash
1 comments
camillomiller 459 days ago
They said themselves that even inference is losing them money tho, or did I get that wrong?
link
ImprobableTruth 459 days ago
On their subscriptions, specifically the pro subscription, because it's a flatrate to their most expensive model. The API prices are all much more expensive. It's unclear whether they're losing money on the normal subscriptions, but if so, probably not by much. Though it's definitely closer to what you described, subsidizing it to gain 'mindshare' or whatever.
link
yousif_123123 459 days ago
Well I think there's many cheaper models in terms of bang for buck currently per token and intelligence than gpt4o. Other than OpenAI having very high rate limits and throughout available without a contract done with sales, I don't see much reason to use it currently instead of sonnet 3.5 or 3.7, or Google's Flash 2.0

Perhaps their training cost and their current inference cost is higher, but what you get as a customer is a more expensive product for what it is, IMO.

link
Szpadel 458 days ago
they for sure lose money on some months for some customers, but I expect globally most of subscriptions (including mine that I recently cancelled) would be much better of to migrate to API

everyone that o know that have/had subscription didn't used it very extensively, and that is how it's still profitable in general

I suspect that it's the same for copilot, especially the business variant, while they definitely lose money on my account, believe that when looking on our whole company subscription I wouldn't be surprised that it's even 30% of what we pay

link