They raised $122-123B this year to bring $50 billion revenue, $20B less than expected. Looks like very sustainable business to me. Even if they bring those $68B that's still 50% burned. Don't you fucking see it ?
this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2026
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And it's all because their models are super under-optimised.
You'd think otherwise with how capable Opus and Fable are, but it's just because the internal harness hides the thinking process, resulting in wildly improved output at the cost of 3-5x more compute being burned.
If they tossed one of the more capable open models in (looking at you, Qwen3.8/Qwen4), those costs would go down a lot.
Flushing money down the toilet, or setting a very large pile of it on fire, would've had the same effect of loss while being less environmentally impactful.
alt title: their losses are $20bn larger than expected
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So cool! I don't think I've ever seen a braille image render before.
Much bigger deal when you realize they're talking revenue because there was already zero profits...
In fact, the word "profit" doesn't appear at all in this article, or most ones about chat or companies
They have like half a trillion in debt. Profit is a pipe dream
They couldn't even do it with an "annualized run rate"!
Next year they're going to take their highest earning 4 hours and multiply it by 2200.
Nice. Please die faster
They're still on track to reach $50 billion revenue
Revenue != Profit
Yeah no one here is confusing the two. A lot of people however do seem to miss that to investors (of all sectors, not just AI) running at a deficit is not necessarily something to shy away from. Most companies that are expanding extremely fast are run at deficits because building out a company usually costs more than it initially makes. So if you can show high revenue and in particular YoY growth (and they actually do) being at a deficit is not as big of an issue to investors.
I think what makes this worse is that their deficits are in the 10s of billions compared to most other startups being in the millions, even if the revenue to expenses ratio is better.
If I start a tech company and I spend 100 million dollars but only pull in 10 million in revenue, that's not great having a 10:1 expense to revenue ratio and 90 million in debt. In the leaked openAI financials from earlier this year, it was something like 13 billion revenue to 33 billion expenses, or about 3:1 expenses to revenue, which certainly seems better. However, the magnitude in actual costs is so much bigger at that point and the risk so much higher for investors. A billionaire can stand to lose on a 90 mill dollar investment, but it hurts a lot more on a 10 billion dollar investment.
And also, what's their path to profitablity? The premiere models are already expensive and getting more expensive. They'd have to charge significantly more to start breaking even, and people just won't pay for that. The cost to continue building and maintaining new DCs is t going to lessen the expenses either. I just think at some point investors are going to realize they aren't going to get an ROI on their investment and either cut back or drop out all together.
I, too, could make $50 billion in revenue if you gave me $250 billion.
So profits are -$920bn instead of -$900bn?
Did they ask chatgpt to do their revenue projection?
No. They just lied.
just ask chatgpt to check in the couch cushions
Anyone actually paying attention is very unsurprised by this