[Retric]

That argument supports any levels of losses, however I also think it’s rather misleading.

Growth means some inefficiencies, but their expenses are largely around commodities like electricity and data centers not a sudden army of salespeople. They also got 150M 11 years ago and 1 billion 7 year ago, they where quite large in 2022.

Basically you don’t get better at writing checks to your local utility which limits how much they can control costs.

[simonw]

> They also got 150M 11 years ago and 1 billion 7 year ago, they where quite large in 2022.

I had to look that up, you're talking about investment there, not earned revenue.

The 150M was their initial funding (actually 130M I think https://www.clay.com/dossier/openai-funding)

The 1B was from Microsoft in 2019: https://openai.com/index/microsoft-invests-in-and-partners-w...

In 2022 they only had 335 employees (according to various internet searches but I can't find an original source for that number.) I can't find credible numbers for revenue from the GPT-3 API, which did have some usage - GitHub Copilot started charging a subscription fee on June 21, 2022 - https://github.blog/changelog/2022-06-21-github-copilot-is-n... - and that was running on the OpenAI Codex model so presumably OpenAI had some revenue from that.

[Retric]

We don’t disagree with the underlying facts.

That said, in many ways 335 employees is the midpoint between 3 employees and 30,000 employees. The CEO can’t keep track of everyone’s names and what they’re doing, you need layers of management, HR, etc. It’s not really a simple exponential function but 335 to 336 is way more automated than going from 3 to 4.