[simoncion]

> 13 billion in revenue, 7.5 in cost of revenue.

and 7.81 billion in R&D from last year. I don't know how long it took to build the weights for the current model, or exactly how much that costs, but it's certainly more than zero days and zero dollars.

I also doubt that OpenAI could set that R&D expense to zero and survive without an agreement from Anthropic that they'll do the same... so that R&D expense can't be ignored when figuring up the total cost of the current model.

[bgirard]

You're missing the point. There was a lot of debate around if inference was subsidized or not. And that's a huge point to confirm in the public discourse.

[slow_typist]

Sure, but being able to pay for inference and nothing but inference out of revenue leads to what end?

[spongebobstoes]

they have 6B left over after paying for inference, that's a lot of money

R&D is a leading expense, a good portion of that is probably R&D for 2026 models

[pilgrim0]

Could they have treated subsidies to inference as a sales and marketing expense, though?

[danielmarkbruce]

They are running 40% margins, assuming the reported numbers are valid.

[simoncion]

> You're missing the point. There was a lot of debate around if inference was subsidized or not.

To answer that question you have to take into account the cost to produce the thing that inference uses. If you don't, then that's like claiming that the total cost of a car is the cost to keep it on a dealer's lot until it's sold.

"Figuring out how much R&D adds to the total cost of a thing" absolutely isn't a new problem. And given that models seem to get supplanted every year, it's not like you're gonna be able to spread those R&D costs out very much.