Don't you worry about burning venture capital, let me worry about blank!
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2026
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I expect that many companies will realize that an LLM is a tool that can help with certain tasks, but cannot fully replace most workers because there is a ton of context in people's jobs that cannot be condensed into language. Similarly, many companies are now realizing with token-based pricing that frontier LLMs are not cost effective in many applications. You shouldn't have a natural gas fired data center in Tennessee running a model to proofread your emails. You can have a local model do so MUCH more cheaply. This will leave the speculative data center companies holding the bag on a lot of hardware and capacity that is not actually needed.
Who did not know this already?
The real issue is that nobody seems to care... I mean, the biggest IPO in history just took place, valuing SpaceX (which was in reality a tiny bit of SpaceX, entirely composed of Grok) at almost 2 TRILLION dollars after they showed a 5 BILLION loss in the last quarter
Reality is for suckers I guess
Los is tremendously profitable companies ran at a deficit for a decade or more. They made their investors a lot of money.
IKR? Was it supposed to be a secret? The game plan is to bleed out the competition, make businesses dependent on AI, and then raise prices sky high.
It's not news that they are losing money, but it is news that they are losing tremendously more money than they were previously losing.
It does weaken the argument that scaling up is the path to profitablity, but of course they'll just claim more money and scaling is the way to go. If the market remains manic they can get away with it.
This kind of feels like a "Duh." moment. We all know.
Losing BILLIONS a Year? That sounds like TRILLION Dollar Status!
-Wall Street!
"Actually, this is good news, as the amount of money lost shows how much money they have gotten. This means they are very good at getting money."
Hey Nasdaq, how much can I get for my compulsive gambler uncle?
Probably a lot if you short him.
All aboard the hype train 🚂. Next stop hypeville. Final destination... Who gives a shit.
I always thank the LLM and ask if it wants a cup of tea. Is this my fault?
Hate on openai all you want but 4xing your revenue over a year is no small feat.
Not as bad as I thought honestly. Looks like they're making a profit on inference, it's just training the models is costing them a shit ton in R&D.
If we hit a plateau and training new models isn't worth it and they scale back there R&D the business could be profitable. Not enough to justify there absurd evaluation, but not a money pit that some people in this thread would have you believe.
The problem is though that inference by itself is going to end up a low margin utility service that there will be loads of players offering, they'll never recoup their costs that way.
The only path to profitability I can imagine is to have a model that is vastly superior to what people can get elsewhere that they can somehow lock people into using and then charge them well over the cost of inference alone. None of which looks likely to happen.
It is a small feat when you're already loosing money.
Not really, tons of companies in silicon valley burn through billions in cash and never even reach $100M in revenue, much less 4x on billions in revenue, that's gotta be single digits in the amount of companies.
Snowflake in there prime when they had the largest IPO ever only got 50% yoy growth after $1b in revenue. 4x is insane
I wonder how much of that revenue is the circular contract bullshit. It's easy to move money around when you have so much of it.
It's not a small feat, but they also 4x'd their expenses, which made them lose significantly more. Long term as you mentioned, if they could entirely drop their R&D, which they'll never get to $0, but if they did, they'd still be almost -$2 billion in profit. Business modes can change to help accommodate that at that point theoretically though.
I just don't see them ever getting there. How many years can you lose $20 billion and stay solvent? They'll raise prices like everyone, but they may lose customers offsetting the gains made, or even if they get more, operating costs will go up too. With all of the DCs being built, I also don't see R&D going down anytime soon either.
How many years can you lose $20 billion and stay solvent?
As long as investors keep pumping money into it. Uber lost billions a year until relatively recently, and they didn't have nearly the same queue of investors ready to pour money into them at an insane markup. You underestimate the tolerance for silicon valley vcs to take in years of loss as long as the companies growing.
With all of the DCs being built, I also don't see R&D going down anytime soon either.
Wouldn't more data centers reduce there cost? More data centers means more capacity and more competition pushing the price down.
Billions of dollars they earned? Did they earn those?