Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by root-parent 3 days ago
>> Inference is _highly_ profitable.

Totally untrue.

2 comments

"Revenue: 13.07b; cost of revenue: 7.5b."

This includes running inference for ~1b free users.

What is untrue about this?

So far as I'm aware, we don't know that inference for free users is counted as cost of revenue as opposed to sales and marketing.

With sales and marketing at 5.7b, which seems unusually high compared to cost of revenue, I think it's deeply irresponsible to ignore that when considering how profitable OpenAI may be. Even taking a charitable interpretation, OpenAI is having to spend considerable budget (more than their gross profit!) to keep people paying for using their services. The less charitable interpretation is that they're deeply unprofitable and they're pulling every legal accounting trick to hide the sources of unprofitability.

How much does 1 million tokens cost OpenAI?