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Open AI has a pretty robust and profitable business without Microsoft. In every enterprise I’ve been involved with over the last few years we have had some incr
by fnordpiglet 3y ago
Open AI has a pretty robust and profitable business without Microsoft. In every enterprise I’ve been involved with over the last few years we have had some incredibly material and important use cases of OpenAI LLMs (as well as Claude). They aren’t spewing slop or whatever, they’re genuinely achieving valuable and foundational business outcomes. I’ve been a bit stunned at how fast we’ve achieved these things and it tells me that the AI hype isn’t hype, and that if we have done these things in a year, it’s hard to estimate how much impact the technologies will have in five but I think it’s substantial. So is our spend with OpenAI. Or rather, with Azure on OpenAI products. The only value from our experiences Microsoft offers is IAM - which is sufficient frankly.
Stability and Midjourney are also making money, but it’s largely with amateurs and people prototyping content for their own creations. A lot of single person Indy game developers are using these tools to generate assets, or at minimum first pass assets. I think a lot of media companies are producing the art for their articles or news letters etc using these tools. Whether this is enough, I don’t know.
- __loam 3y agoSigh I'm really tired of seeing people assume OpenAI is profitable. We have no idea of they are or not and have some indication that they're incinerating money on chatgpt to the point that they're turning off sign ups because they're out of compute.
- refulgentis 3y agoI'm not sure that's a useful argument insomuch as A) its unfalsifiable until they IPO (reporting indicates they are very, very profitable) and B) running out of GPUs seems like an odd thing to name as an indicator you're _losing_ money. People are genuinely way, way, way underestimating how intense the GPU shortage is.
- __loam 3y agoI haven't seen any reporting about their costs. I'm sure they're making bonkers numbers in revenue, but that doesn't mean they're profitable if they're losing money on every gpt call. You're saying my claim that they're unprofitable is unfalsifiable. The same is true for claims that they're wildly profitable. We just don't know the financial state of the company because they're not public.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoMy understanding, which I can’t prove other than to say it comes from folks affiliated with OpenAI, is that chatgpt doesn’t make money but also doesn’t lose money (in aggregate, some accounts use way more than others but many accounts are fairly idle), and their API business is profitable and accounts for most of their GPU utilization. I have no insight into why they would turn off signups for chatgpt other than they may need the capacity for their enterprise customers, where they make a decent margin.