How OpenAI uses complex and circular deals to fuel its multibillion-dollar rise

These kinds of deals were very much a la mode just prior to the .com crash. Companies would buy advertising, then the websites and ad agencies would buy their services and they'd spend it again on advertising. The end result is immense revenues without profits.

There’s one key difference in my opinion: pre-.com deals were buying revenue with equity and nothing else. It was growth for growth’s sake. All that scale delivered mostly nothing.

OpenAI applies the same strategy, but they’re using their equity to buy compute that is critical to improving their core technology. It’s circular, but more like a flywheel and less like a merry-go-round. I have some faith it could go another way.

> they’re using their equity to buy compute that is critical to improving their core technology

But we know that growth in the models is not exponential, its much closer to logarithmic. So they spend =equity to get >results.

The ad spend was a merry go round, this is a flywheel where the turning grinds its gears until its a smooth burr. The math of the rising stock prices only begins to make sense if there is a possible breakthrough that changes the flywheel into a rocket, but as it stands its running a lemonade stand where you reinvest profits into lemons that give out less juice

OpenAI invests heavily into integration with other products. If model development stalls they just need to be not worse than other stalled models while taking advantage of brand recognition and momentum to stay ahead in other areas.

In that sense it makes sense to keep spending billions even f model development is nearing diminishing return - it forces competition to do the same and in that game victory belongs to the guy with deeper pockets.

Investors know that, too. A lot of startup business is a popularity contents - number one is more attractive for the sheer fact of being number one. If you’re a very rational investor and don’t believe in the product you still have to play this game because others are playing it, making it true. The vortex will not stop unless limited partners start pushing back.

But, if model development stalls, and everyone else is stalled as well, then what happens to turn the current wildly-unprofitable industry into something that "it makes sense to keep spending billions" on?

Because they’re not that wildly unprofitable. Yes, obviously the companies spend a ton of money on training, but several have said that each model is independently “profitable” - the income from selling access to the model has overcome the costs of training it. It’s just that revenues haven’t overcome the cost of training the next one, which gets bigger every time.