[sheepscreek]

The title is misleading. It should be read as “Some $20/month users who made videos on Sora costed OpenAI $65 in compute.”

OpenAI is most definitely in a position to be profitable. They are spending less than a third of their revenue on compute (all infrastructure costs combined).

[Aedelon]

Yeah fair, the $65 is for someone cranking out 50 clips/month. Most users were probably doing 5-10, so more like $6.50-$13 in compute. That's fine at $20/month.

Doesn't change the bigger picture much though. OpenAI's at $25B annualized revenue and still projecting $14B in losses for 2026. Sora wasn't the only problem, just the most obvious one.

[sheepscreek]

The major reason for that is, they are pushing hard on capital expenditure (one-time training costs), building their own silicon and people costs (they have between 4000-6000 employees). If OpenAI really wanted to be profitable today, I am sure they can do it, but they would no longer be competitive.

In other words, we're NO LONGER looking at the scenario where their unit economics was out of whack and lopsided against profitability. The AI frontier behemoths of today (OpenAI, Anthropic and Google) are very well positioned for strong profitability unless Chinese AI companies start gaining more market share in North America.

Yet, I don't think the pace of competition is sustainable. Once there is stronger pressure on them for profitability, we'll see them slow their moonshots, cut costs and focus more on the core business. Maybe that is what we are starting to see now.