this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2026
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Programming
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FWIW the general consensus is that they are just about making a profit on selling it by the token (as opposed to the subscriptions which are massively subsidised) so long as you pretend that capital expenses and R&D aren't real and at some point they could stop doing them in order to make profit.
That is very much not a given, with all the labs in a death march to not let the others get better than them and take their lunch, and open source only 9-18 months behind the closed models.
The thing about per token basis is that it's hard to justify unless you get token back whenever it spends a shitload of tokens on some rabbit hole. The alternative is me baby sitting every action it does which would make it very hard to justify me paying anything at all.
This is what the tech bros claim (which is obviously convenient so they can lure more ~~suckers~~ investors in); every outside pundit concludes otherwise
Check this article I received yesterday... in a nutshell, if a company returns less than 7% on investment, they would normally be liquidated by investors. To make it to 7%, AI companies would have to reach a revenue of $2 TRILLION per year (cumulative amongst the big AI players, which are like 5 total)
Last leaked financials from OpenAI showed $13 Billion revenue and a $21 billion loss
Your link is broken.
Yes, judging them now the big AI companies are terrible businesses, they are just about, maybe, marginally profitable if they stop the huge fixed expenses which they cant stop because of their environment.
The gamble is that AI will increase in usage, while becoming more efficient and resisting becoming commoditised. I don't think there's a strong chance of all three of those happening, but if they did that would justify them losing money now in order to make big profits later. That's the gamble.
Sorry about that, here is another https://archive.ph/3V0oc
But again we already know that is impossible since the economies of scale do not work. Each extra user means a shit ton of extra processing in those Data Centers and, even disregarding the destruction of the planet, nobody will pay that cost just to get 35% hallucinations in their queries.
Right now, they are literally gambling with the IPOs that they hype will last long enough for them to cash out and let pension plans and other large automated index investors holding the bag.
This Xmas may not be merry at all...