[mandevil]

But didn't they spend $9 billion? If I have a machine that magically turns $9 billion of investor money into $4 billion in revenue, I need to have a pretty awesome story for how in the future I am going to be making enormous piles of money to pay back that investment. If it looks like frontier models are going to be a commodity and it is not going to be winner-take-all... that's a lot harder story to tell.

[BosunoB]

Most of that 9 billion was spent on training new models and on staff. If they stopped spending money on R&D, they would already be profitable.

[JumpCrisscross]

> if they stopped spending money on R&D, they would already be profitable

OpenAI has claimed this. But Altman is a pathological liar. There are lots of ways of disguising operating costs as capital costs or R&D.

[PUSH_AX]

In a space that moves this fast and is defined by research breakthroughs, they’d be profitable for about 5 minutes.

[ezekg]

Says literally every startup ever i.r.t. R&D/marketing/ad spend yet that's rarely reality.

[ahtihn]

> If they stopped spending money on R&D, they would already be profitable.

The news that they did that would make them lose most of their revenue pretty fast.

[PeterStuer]

But only if everyone else stopped improving models as well.

In this niche you can be irrellevant in months when your models drop behind.