Comment by maplethorpe
4 days ago
Didn't OpenAI spend like 10 billion on inference in 2025? Which is around the same as their total revenue?
Why do people keep saying inference is cheap if they're losing so much money from it?
4 days ago
Didn't OpenAI spend like 10 billion on inference in 2025? Which is around the same as their total revenue?
Why do people keep saying inference is cheap if they're losing so much money from it?
When you have 800–900 million active users, no matter how cheap it is, your costs will be in the billions.
They paid about $10B on inference and had about $10B in revenue in 2025. The users and numbers of zeroes on those numbers are not relevant. What is relevant is the ratio of those numbers. They apparently are not even profitable on inference, wich is the cheap part of the whole business.
And cost of inference tripled from $3B in 2024 to $10B in 2025, so cost of revenue linearly grows with number of users, i.e. it does not get cheaper.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/