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0 pointsmandevil1y ago0 comments

But didn't they spend $9 billion? If I have a machine that magically turns $9 billion of investor money into $4 billion in revenue, I need to have a pretty awesome story for how in the future I am going to be making enormous piles of money to pay back that investment. If it looks like frontier models are going to be a commodity and it is not going to be winner-take-all... that's a lot harder story to tell.

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BosunoB1y ago

Most of that 9 billion was spent on training new models and on staff. If they stopped spending money on R&D, they would already be profitable.

JumpCrisscross1y ago

> if they stopped spending money on R&D, they would already be profitable

OpenAI has claimed this. But Altman is a pathological liar. There are lots of ways of disguising operating costs as capital costs or R&D.

PUSH_AX1y ago

In a space that moves this fast and is defined by research breakthroughs, they’d be profitable for about 5 minutes.

ezekg1y ago

Says literally every startup ever i.r.t. R&D/marketing/ad spend yet that's rarely reality.

ahtihn1y ago

> If they stopped spending money on R&D, they would already be profitable.

The news that they did that would make them lose most of their revenue pretty fast.

PeterStuer1y ago

But only if everyone else stopped improving models as well.

In this niche you can be irrellevant in months when your models drop behind.

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