[surgical_fire]

Depends on the vendor and how they charge. OpenAI loses money on subscriptions [1]. Maybe the people who pay 200 bucks on a subscription are exactly the kind of people that will try to use the maximum out of it, and if you go down to the 20 bucks tier you will find more of the type of user that pays but doesn't use it all that much?

I would presume that companies selling compute for AI inference either make some money or at least break even when they serve a request. But I wouldn't b surprised if they are subsidizing this cost for the time being.

[1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/sam-altman-says-losing-money-...

[simonw]

That "losing money on subscriptions" story is a one-off Sam Altman tweet from January 2025, when they were promoting their brand new $200 account and the first version of Sora. I wouldn't treat that as a universal truth.

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1876104315296968813

"insane thing: we are currently losing money on openai pro subscriptions!

people use it much more than we expected"

[surgical_fire]

Sam Altman is a bullshitter. A liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it. A bullshitter doesn't care if something is true of false, and is just using rhetoric to convince you of something.

I don't doubt that it is true that they lose money on a 200 subscription because the people that pay 200 are probably the same people that will max out usage over time, no matter how wasteful. Sam Altman was framing it in a way to say "it's so useful people are using it more than we expected!", because he is interested in having everyone believe that LLMs are the future. It's all bullshit.

If I had to guess, they probably at least break even on API calls, and might make some money on lower tier subscriptions (i.e.: people that pay for it but use it sparingly on a as-need basis).

But that is boring, and hints at limited usability. Investors won't want to burn hundreds of billions in cash for something that may be sort of useful. They want destructive amounts of money in return.