The launch of GPT-5 has been rather disappointing for users at street level and has come accompanied by some problems, something that Sam Altman has recognized, CEO of Openai. However, he is sweeping a key sector: companies, for the quality of their reasoning models and their Price.
Not being a company that quotes in the stock market, the doubt is how much of that success translates into large income, and Sarah Friar, financial director of OpenAi has given a key fact: Openai has entered 1,000 million dollars in a month (July) for the first time in its history.
Results as good as insufficient. Openai’s reality is that it is still early to celebrate a figure like that announced by Friar, especially when the executive recognized that artificial intelligence “right now is voracious in GPU and in a computational power.” In that sense, he affirmed that the biggest problem they face is “being constantly under computational capacity.” That is, the demand for the use of GPUs of its models is greater than the resources they have to cover it.
The plan to cover their needs is clear, and Friar recalled it: “That is why we launch Stargate”, in reference to that historical project in which members such as Microsoft, Oracle, Nvidia and ARM participate, and in which they hope to spend 500,000 million. They expect, because there is still a single signed contract, and finding more sources of financing is a huge challenge. With this financial context, the 1,000 million dollars that OpenAi already enters a month are totally insufficient.
They look for solutions, but more complications arise along the way. The reality of artificial intelligence according to Sam Altman is that his demand will continue to grow, their training needs will continue to grow and spend “probably more aggressively than any company has done in something for progress.”
Given this need, OpenAi seeks solutions, such as selling 6,000 million in shares with an assessment of 500,000 million dollars, after raising 40,000 million in a financing round at the end of March, with an assessment of 300,000 million. 18,000 million were going to dedicate themselves to the Stargate projector. The problem is that to get the last 30,000 million of that round, Openai had to become a “For-Profit” company, a path that has recently abandoned.
A problem structure of expenses. As much as Openai continues to have the confidence of large investors such as Softbank or Microsoft, the problem is that the company’s expenses are huge. Not being a quoted company, we cannot know official figures, but estimates point to 8,000 million operating expenses per year (which do not count investments, infrastructure or other financial obligations).
Even if it continues to enter the current rhythm (1 billion per month), in 2025 it would not go from 12,000 (the estimate they managed for this year, according to The Information). That is, only their operating expenses “eat” 66% of the operating expenses, which do not contemplate their higher volume investments. The cost scheme is very complicated, and Sam Altman came to affirm that they lost money even with Chatgpt Pro, the subscription of 229 euros per month.
And the profitability for when. According to an internal study, Openai will lose 44,000 million dollars between 2023 and 2028, and 14,000 million alone in 2026, the triple of those estimated by 2024. It will have to wait four more years, until 2029, so that the company exceeds the break even and achieve the long -awaited profitability. It is something they estimate that they would get 100,000 million dollars annually.
Right now, viral moments such as the generation of chatgpt images and their explosion of images of Ghibli either help: “Derrit” servers with enormous cost. The good news is that Sarah Friar confirmed that they have seen acceleration in the adoption of payment subscriptions. But much remains to stop losing money.
Image | Dima Solomin in Unspash, Village Global
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