Thanks for sharing! It's pretty rare to see a balanced take from Ed Zitron.
> I also cannot reconcile these numbers with the reporting that OpenAI will have a cash burn of $9 billion in CY2025. On inference alone, OpenAI has already spent $8.67 billion through Q3 CY2025.
> It's pretty rare to see a balanced take from Ed Zitron.
How are you understanding the word 'balanced'? Do you mean _tone_, or something? Like, this is unusually dry and non-grumpy for Ed, but it's if anything more critical than his normal output.
Depends if these numbers are counting the free Azure credits that Microsoft invested in them.
There's a story here that's in some ways bigger than OpenAI or Anthropic's finances. Someone is leaking very sensitive and private financial information to Ed. They're clearly getting these numbers from somewhere and given the monthly breakdowns Ed posted previously for Anthropic, they are likely coming from a billing dashboard of some kind inside the big clouds. It's not very likely the leaks are coming from inside the AI labs themselves because of how cloud specific and incomplete they are.
For a big cloud to have a rogue insider like this is huge. It's really rare for big tech firms to leak private data and this report suggests MS or whoever has this problem hasn't been able to find the leaker, which is amazing. These numbers can't be that widely distributed surely? If companies like OpenAI aren't safe from leaks then nobody is.
No — the big story is definitely that the people essentially propping up the US investment market are bullshitting about the most consequential expenses they have for their long-term viability. The big story isn’t that someone was sneaky getting that information out to people.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 34.2 ms ] thread> I also cannot reconcile these numbers with the reporting that OpenAI will have a cash burn of $9 billion in CY2025. On inference alone, OpenAI has already spent $8.67 billion through Q3 CY2025.
This is insane.
How are you understanding the word 'balanced'? Do you mean _tone_, or something? Like, this is unusually dry and non-grumpy for Ed, but it's if anything more critical than his normal output.
brb buying puts
This along with the fact that it is easier than ever to switch models today. And the fierce competition from Google and Anthropic.
Cannot wait for the pump and dump that the OpenAI IPO is going to be.
How high are OpenAI's compute costs? Possibly a lot higher than we thought
https://www.ft.com/content/fce77ba4-6231-4920-9e99-693a6c38e...
- OpenAI claims to have spent $2.5 billion on inference in H1 of 2025, report claims it actually spent $5.02 billion
- OpenAI claims to have made $3.7 billion in revenues in 2024, report claims it actually made $2.469 billion
- OpenAI claims to have made $4.3 billion in revenues in H1 of 2025, report claims it actually made $2.273 billion
There's a story here that's in some ways bigger than OpenAI or Anthropic's finances. Someone is leaking very sensitive and private financial information to Ed. They're clearly getting these numbers from somewhere and given the monthly breakdowns Ed posted previously for Anthropic, they are likely coming from a billing dashboard of some kind inside the big clouds. It's not very likely the leaks are coming from inside the AI labs themselves because of how cloud specific and incomplete they are.
For a big cloud to have a rogue insider like this is huge. It's really rare for big tech firms to leak private data and this report suggests MS or whoever has this problem hasn't been able to find the leaker, which is amazing. These numbers can't be that widely distributed surely? If companies like OpenAI aren't safe from leaks then nobody is.