I wonder what the motivation is. Surely is not to do something good.
Tax deductions by donating money to a non-profit?
A try to get a grasp on one programming language with a bright future so they could profit out of it later?
A PR move?
this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2026
56 points (98.3% liked)
Programming
27345 readers
169 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
I hope the grant is not paid in tokens
Making me consider switching over from Claude. But Opus is still quite a bit better at programming, so I think I'll wait until next GPT release.
Platinun
Are they donating some of their debt? Is money even real?
No, OpenAI keeps the debt until they file bankruptcy defrauding investors of many billions total. Likely right before the Trump admin ends so that they can bribe officials to let them off the hook.
Yikes
OpenAI is the one who needs donations
It's called subscription fees.
Wdym, they get donations all the time
They are bleeding money
You've got it all backwards. In an ideal capitalist world, the greedy software nonprofit foundations bleed the innovative corporations of their well-earned revenue.
No, they are now charging by usage. They will either end up with boatloads of money while people still have ChatGPT integrated into their workflows, or they will end up with zero money as people either switch to other models or realize that AI was a shit idea all along.
No, they are now charging by usage.
Not the actual cost... they are still losing money even in their most expensive tiers. There is just no path to profitability with ANY of the current models, they simply cost more to run than the people they are supposedly trying to replace
Right, which is “AI was shit all along” branch.
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.
FWIW the general consensus is that they are just about making a profit
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.
Your link is broken.
Sorry about that, here is another https://archive.ph/3V0oc
The gamble is that AI will increase in usage, while becoming more efficient and resisting becoming commoditised.
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...
Also business customers are fleeing in droves because they’re forcing API only pricing for businesses and everyone is getting sticker shock at the costs.
0.25c / compiled byte (pcb) without plan, or 1 million pcb for 5 hours access per day with the MaxProUltra frontier $20 / month.
And, can I sell you this chocolate bar while you are waiting for the compilation result? Only 0.99c!
Anyway, at least, it's not going to be like Anthropic and Bun, it's not like they gonna rewrite the thing in Rust.
Fuck Rust for this.
- "Corporations should contribute back to open source projects"
- Corporation donates to <project>.
- "Fuck <project>"
It's not like Rust is using ChatGPT to rewrite the std crate. You'd prefer that they not compensate the humans actually improving the project?
Corporations shouldn't contribute to open source projects cause corporations shouldn't exist; especially Open AI.