Yes if you ignore all the reasons why they’re horribly unprofitable, they’re profitable.

R&D costs are hurting profit side and while you can cut that one just becomes irrelevant overnight in this space if you do, hence the problem.

So you’re saying if you cut all the cost centers a company would only have profit centers? If you ignore all the losses you’ll only have profits?

Cut down on the one thing they need to keep themselves relevant in this space?

OpenAI can easily cut R&D costs by replacing engineers with Claude Code

While you cant discount 100% R&D they are close, agreed

Numbers are probably not right as classifying everything aa r&d is going to the temptation

I bet any FAANG spend is mostly R&D.

If it's not materials, not energy or taxes, not manufacturing, not licensing or rental fees, then I can only think of R&D.

Even if they keep the R&D costs, more efficient inference and 0 Marketing spend also gets you there. Inference is honestly super inefficient at this point, we can do far better than GPUs, push utilisation up, build more efficient datacentres.

If they cut down on R&D they will be no better than the open source models you can run at cost yourself.

>> Inference is _highly_ profitable.

Totally untrue.

Yes, it is like a new era - the startups have huge direct revenue instead of "users" which yet to be monetized.

I will do nothing to “support” AI. Either it has utility or it doesn’t. I feel no loyalty or duty to help make it work if it doesn’t.

Anyway: Zero, as of right now.

I fully expect to be able to run useful LLMs on a machine I can justify buying for other reasons. I already can on the secondhand kit I own, and I don’t expect the cost-benefit analysis of local LLMs to ever really get worse.

If I ever need to pay for it, it will likely be to shift some of the capacity into the cloud for either business or pragmatic personal reasons (so I can just carry an iPad etc.)

I fully intend my expenditure to be negligible. Because once one realises that outspending others is impossible, only spending minimisation makes sense.

I foresee it potentially making sense for me to move some mature tools off a local LLM to openrouter, maybe. But probably to the same or similar models.

I pay for good tools that I use.

I spend 30 - 60 bucks a year with Horizon Labs.

I spend 25 bucks a month on Cursor. Cursor replaced an OpenAI sub.

Both support hobby projects. If either cost increased I would spend some time testing local alternatives and probably drop them.

Horizon Labs especially, I know that they have been matched by open models and are mostly a convenience at this point.

I don’t and won’t support AI. For a while I paid 200€ a month and would have been happy to pay up to maybe 600€. However I don’t want to participate anymore in using such an anti-human technology and industry

I've spent a grand total of $25 on AI ever, so apparently my answer is $25. But I'm not a big time software dev like the rest of you.

When I bought my last GPU, running AI models locally was a consideration though not the only one, and I have it set up but haven't used it much yet. I mostly use the free tiers of ChatGPT or Google to write the occasional script for me. I guess they're going to have to inject a truly unfathomable number of ads to get their money's worth.

I have a feeling my experience is closer to an average persons' than a dev, but it doesn't seem like they'll be able to monetize just from devs even if each one is spending thousands a month.

For personal use not more than 30$/month.

For work, it depends, but if I have to spend more than a few hundreds bucks probably I'll start looking for alternatives (local models, Chinese providers, ecc)

PS: I'm in Italy, I guess in several parts of the world these figures are even smaller.

Max 60 bucks a month. More than that and I'd just move to local qwen 35b or some other cheaper model on openrouter.

I’d easily pay multiple hundreds. Possibly a thousand a month.

If I were really forced to.

LLMs provide me about the same value as a car does.

Never paid a cent, never will pay a cent. I have my principles.

It may put me at a disadvantage when it comes to quickly slop something together? But so far the free-to-use chat bots do as well for my needs.

Zero. It provides no value to me.

6bn seems excessive but despite GPT 5.5 arguably being better than Claude I don't see a lot of adoption of Codex yet.

Some of my coworkers even use Sonnet (the default in Claude Code for the 20 USD subscription) and see no reason to change even though that model is definitely "outdated" compared to current SOTA.

I didn't look at the financials but the subscription product is heavily discounted relative to the API pricing and that difference could well be booked as a marketing expense. They also have a string of grant and similar initiatives (like $50M each) that could be marketing. There's a lot of stuff they could assign at least partially to marketing, and it sounds like they spend money pretty freely.

I cannot consume any content anywhere without being slapped in the face with an unending stream of OpenAI ads and paid plugs. I'd guess most of that money is going directly to Google and Facebook.

I've seen physical billboards in the Portland, OR area for OpenAI, so I guess that accounts for at least part of it. Not really sure what kind of return they're getting on those but apparently they can just do whatever they want, even if they're losing money.

They need marketing because they have competition that essentially offers an identical product. Why should a consumer choose openai over anthropic or whatever else there is? The answer is not obvious.

They have a large and rapidly growing enterprise sales organization. If you want to sell to enterprises you need account executives, solutions engineers, forward deployed engineers, etc.

They are paying influencers to pretend they use LLMs, and discredit Chinese models: https://www.wired.com/story/super-pac-backed-by-openai-and-p...

It costs money to get influencers to set up kool-aid stands on their platforms.

I've seen lots of ads saying I should use chatgpt to plan a workout or give me recipes. Thats apparently the killer app for 95% of the population at this point.

If anything this is MORE evidence that the infinite money printer will be coming online any second now! Yep aaaaany second now... OH THERE IT- awww one of you guys wasn't praying hard enough.

their PR department is probably still trying to figure out what narrative the bots should follow for this one.

You mean the lack of pro-Anthropic/OpenAI comments, who are gambling tokens at their casinos and won't admit that they are very expensive.

This is because people here are quietly realizing that they fell for the "token-maxxing" marketing drive which was complete BS for you to gamble more money on tokens as the big AI labs gave heavily subsidized token prices they cannot afford.

Jevon's paradox does not exist at those companies, but it certainly exists at the Chinese AI Labs at Deepseek, Alibaba, z.AI and Xiaomi.