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Are OpenAI and Anthropic losing money on inference?

(martinalderson.com)
507 points martinald | 2 comments | 28 Aug 25 10:15 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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gitremote ◴[28 Aug 25 13:44 UTC] No.45052117[source]▶
These numbers are off.

> $20/month ChatGPT Pro user: Heavy daily usage but token-limited

ChatGPT Pro is $200/month and Sam Altman already admitted that OpenAI is losing money from Pro subscriptions in January 2025:

"insane thing: we are currently losing money on openai pro subscriptions!

people use it much more than we expected."

- Sam Altman, January 6, 2025

https://xcancel.com/sama/status/1876104315296968813

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Topfi ◴[28 Aug 25 15:02 UTC] No.45053078[source]▶
That doesn't seem compatible with what he stated more recently:

> We're profitable on inference. If we didn't pay for training, we'd be a very profitable company.

Source: https://www.axios.com/2025/08/15/sam-altman-gpt5-launch-chat...

His possible incentives and the fact OpenAI isn't a public company simply make it hard for us to gauge which of these statements is closer to the truth.

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1. WesolyKubeczek ◴[28 Aug 25 15:23 UTC] No.45053373[source]▶
This can be true if you assume that there exists a high number of $20 subscribers who don't use the product that much, but $200 subscribers squeeze every last bit and then some more. The balance could be still positive, but if you look at the power users alone, they might cost more than they pay.
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2. bee_rider ◴[28 Aug 25 15:31 UTC] No.45053474[source]▶
They might even have decided “hey, these power users are willing to try and tells us what LLMs are useful for, and are even willing to pay us for the opportunity!”