https://www.axios.com/2025/08/15/sam-altman-gpt5-launch-chat... quotes Sam Altman saying:
> Most of what we're building out at this point is the inference [...] We're profitable on inference. If we didn't pay for training, we'd be a very profitable company.
Which is like saying, “If all we did is charge people money and didn’t have any COGS, we’d be a very profitable company.” That’s a truism of every business and therefore basically meaningless.
I can't imagine the hoops an accountant would have to go through to argue training cost is COGS. In the most obvious stick-figures-for-beginners interpretation, as in, "If I had to explain how a P&L statement works to an AI engineer", training is R&D cost and inference cost is COGS.