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>OpenAI is not a profitable company. People have to stop saying this with NO evidence to back it up. And by evidence I do not mean random investors opinions, a
by NewsaHackO 1y ago
>OpenAI is not a profitable company.
People have to stop saying this with NO evidence to back it up. And by evidence I do not mean random investors opinions, anonymous "insider" infomation, etc. Give numbers. Saying the same thing 1000x doesn't make it true.
- swarnie 1y agoSurely the burden of proof lies on the more unbelievable side? Show me how a company setting never before seen piles of money on fire is profitable. Until someone can i'll happily keep claiming they're unprofitable.
- NewsaHackO 1y agoThe burden of evidence is on the side of the person making the claim.
- ImPostingOnHN 1y agoThe claim is that they are profitable -- all businesses are unprofitable until proven otherwise. That's the null hypothesis for business profitability. The null hypothesis is what must be disproven with evidence.
- NewsaHackO 1y agoThat's not the definition of null hypothesis buddy
- ImPostingOnHN 1y agoI am not convinced by your assertion there, friend. Do you, in fact, have evidence they are profitable? Obviously we cannot assume every business is profitable unless proven unprofitable. That's why reporting and audits exist. Note that they totally could be! I'm not asserting one or the other. But unprofitable is the default, absent evidence.
- NewsaHackO 1y agoHuh? I never said they were profitable. In fact, I never even said they were not unprofitable.
- ImPostingOnHN 1y agoRight, I am saying there is no evidence they are profitable, so we fall back to the default, that they are unprofitable. Indeed, the other poster seems right: "The burden of evidence is on the side of the person making the claim" is simplistic and reductionist. "The burden of proof lies on the more unbelievable side" is more appropriate. Taking an example: If I said the earth was not flat, and someone else told me to prove it, that proof would be unnecessary, because the earth being flat is more unbelievable than the alternative.
- NewsaHackO 1y ago>Taking an example: If I said 1+1=2 and someone else told me to prove it, that proof would be unnecessary, because 1+1=2 is more believable than any alternative sum. Oh, so you are just trolling. Got it.
- ImPostingOnHN 1y agoYep, everyone you don't agree with is trolling.
- NewsaHackO 1y agoI see you ninja edited your post to a more palatable example, good job!
- ImPostingOnHN 1y agois it really a "ninja edit" when you impulse replied literally 2 minutes after I posted? of course normal people edit their post within the first couple minutes of making it. maybe wait longer before replying? try 2 hours if "ninja edits" are a problem for you. at that point, the post parenting your reply will be un-editable, so you need not worry. but anyhow, back on topic: no evidence of profitability implies unprofitable by default.
- hansmayer 1y agoWhat do you mean "no evidence"? The Information had just published a concrete analysis showing the OpenAI is spending the threefold of what they collect in revenues. And many other bloggers, Ed Zitron being one of the better known ones, have been writing about it forever.
- NewsaHackO 1y agoNope, proven wrong upthread :) >A recent article[1] from this year says "OpenAI looks to meet its full-year revenue target of $13 billion and a cash-burn target of $8.5 billion, the report added." [1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/openais-first-half-revenue-rises-16-about-43-billion-information-reports-2025-09-30/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/openais-first-half-revenu...
- hansmayer 1y agoWell, OpenAI "looks to" a lot of things (AGI by the end of 2025 was also one stated goal), but unfortunately, facts are something else. Your artical sums up the costs for running ChatGPT to 2.5B + another 6.7B for "research and development", a.k.a. bunch of PhDs tweaking the model weights - so that is a total of what, roughly 9B USD? Congrats, their burn for the first half was not 3x times the revenue, it was "only" slightly over 2x times that. I am not sure where did they pull the projection for ~13B revenue for the whole year, if they generated only a third of that in the while first half of it? Maybe from that latest pivot, erotica-ChatGPT, but otherwise...no.
- Legend2440 1y agoThere’s a lot of motivated reasoning going on around here. People want AI to fail so it doesn’t threaten their $300k developer salary.
- hansmayer 1y agoNo nothing to do with that. Read up on the report by The Information about how much OpenAI spent in the first half-year vs. how much they collected in revenues, maybe that will clear things up ?
- emp17344 1y agoThis kind of comment isn’t helpful. Of course, people around here also want AI to succeed for various reasons. Everyone has an agenda. Judge based on the merit of the argument.
- Legend2440 1y agoThe issue is that motivated arguments aren’t honest. It becomes like arguing about politics or religion. If it turns out that OpenAI becomes wildly profitable, they’ll just shift to some other argument about the environment or the specialness of human thought or whatever.
- emp17344 1y agoBut they aren’t profitable, and there’s no clear path for them to become profitable. The people you’re railing against aren’t exactly wrong to be skeptical.
- Legend2440 1y agoThe “clear path” is they stop building new datacenters and spending billions on R&D to train new models. This would make them profitable overnight.