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Comment by gloryjulio | Hacker News Reader

> there were established ways to take people's money and it wasn't clear why Stripe had an offering worth switching to.

That wasn't true at all. Stripe was a product that people were rushing to pay for it for just how good and useful it was. It was an example of success MVP that people want to pay to use and the profitability was not a problem.

The same can't be true for OpenAI. We don't know how long it can stay in the red. Maybe it can survive. Maybe its money will run dry first. We are not so sure at current stage

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That last part is a key differentiator between Stripe and OpenAI.

Stripe had high variable costs (staff, COGS of pass-through processing fees) but low fixed costs. OpenAI has enormous fixed (pre-revenue!) costs alongside high variable costs (staff of AI engineers, inference).

Financially, OpenAI looks more like one of the EV startups like Tesla or Rivian than it does a company like Stripe. And where Stripe was competing with relatively stodgy financial institutions, OpenAI is competing with the very biggest, richest companies in the world.

What are OpenAI's enormous fixed costs if not the staff?

Models cost a ton of money to train. GPT-4 training was > $100m. GPT-5 training is estimated to be order of $1B-$2B. This is in the same ballpark as Tesla allocated to get the Fremont facility online.

It is likely training generations beyond GPT-5 will cost still more.

These are essentially fixed costs as OpenAI has to pay to train the model whether or not anyone ever uses it.

if you're here you probably know about Claude and llama3 but for people outside of tech, how many are just going to plug ChatGPT into Google and not venture any further and just plonk down $20?

Is the market of individuals plonking down $20 enough to cover their costs, if they're not able to make sales to moderately clueful CTOs?

Claude is legitimately amazing and saves me so much time and effort. I use both ChatGPT and Claude, at least for now, and Claude really impresses me.

My biggest issue with Claude was timeouts when uploading images for translation, but otherwise love it

Why would they plug chatgpt into google when gemini is built in?

Isn't that kinda solved problem already? Just push more money in marketing. Like actual marketing. I have only seen some medical AIs this far... But same B2C model as done previously seems the obvious play to follow when someone has something.

Exactly my point. I took great pains to not say "OpenAI will 100% die without fail," because doing so would be declarative in a way that would wall off my argument, no matter how well I researched and presented it.

Instead, I wanted to show people the terms under which OpenAI survives, and how onerous said terms were. It's deeply concerning - and I do not think that's a big thing to say! - how much money they may be burning, and how much money they will take to survive.

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