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

I also just don’t understand, as someone with no business experience, how they aren’t just pouring all of that money into enhancing their production capacity. That’s very clearly their bottleneck here.

Yes, I’m certain they are spending an astronomical amount on that already, but why not more? Surely paying more money for construction of more facilities still nets gain even if you run into diminishing returns?

Instead they set up this whacko tax laundering scheme? Just seems like more corporate pocket filling to me, an idiot with no business knowledge.

Why would they want to do that? The only sector that matter to nvidia is datacenter, its where 90%+ of their profits are. Making their consumer sector even less profitable just seems like a waste of time

What's shocking is the gulf between those companies and corporate 'normality'.

Eastern Airways, a UK airline, has just gone bust due to accumulated debts of £26 million. That's not even a rounding error for Google, yet was enough to put a 47-year-old company into bankruptcy and its staff out of work.

I think the only historical parallel to this disparity was the era of the East India Company.

100 billion a quarter is Alphabet, right? Given how much click fraud there is, and that every org and business under the sun is held to ransom to feature on the SERP for their own name even — it’s tempting to say Google’s become a private tax on everything.

Odd how they are simultaneously having large layoffs even as reporting record revenues.

The question is where the profits are.

So many such profitable companies are the best possible evidence for the need for drastic antitrust intervention. The lack of competition and regulation is leading to a massive drain on every other sector.

How much more was worth USD at the beginning of the year?

If the inference is profitable and training new models is actually an endless arms race that's actually the best outcome for nvidia specifically.

It's like how every big co these days is ML. It will transition to LLMs as well.

Just give it a few years.

Right. As far as I can tell, OpenAI, Grok, etc sell me tokens at a loss. But I am having a hard time figuring out how to turn tokens into money (i.e. increased productivity). I can justify $40-$200 per developer per month on tokens but not more than that.

Inference cost has been going down for a while now. At what point do you think it will be profitable? When cost goes down by 2x? 5x?

I can't read your hyperbolically titled paywalled medium post, so idk if it has data I'm not aware of or is just rehashing the same stats about OpenAI & co currently losing money (mostly due to training and free users) but here's a non paywalled blog post that I personally found convincing: https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2025-06-02-llms-are-ch...

This is behind a paywall. Is there a free link you can share ?

And I guess no one of the people who were doing that paid but the community paid the price for this scam ?

> 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

I think that, at best, that description boils down to Nvidia, Oracle, etc inventing fake wealth to build something and OpenAI building their own fake wealth by getting to use that new compute effectively for free.

There are physical products involved, but the situation otherwise feels very similar to ads prior to dotcom.

> 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.

I'm commenting here in case a large crash occurs, to have a nice relic of the zeitgeist of the time.

Eventually when ChatGPT replaces Google Search, they will run ads, and so have that whole revenue stream. Still isn't enough money to buy the trillions worth of infrastructure they want, but it might be enough to keep the lights on.

> critical to improving their core technology

It is at the very least highly debatable how much their core technology is improving from generation to generation despite the ballooning costs.

Dotcom scams included "vendor financing", where telecom equipment providers invested in their customers who built infrastructure:

https://time.com/archive/6931645/how-the-once-luminous-lucen...

The customers bought real equipment that was claimed to be required for the "exponential growth" of the Internet. It is very much like building data centers.

The assumption is that they have a large moat.

If they don't then they're spending a ton of money to level up models and tech now, but others will eventually catch up and their margins will vanish.

This will be true if (as I believe) AI will plateau as we run out of training data. As this happens, CPU process improvements and increased competition in the AI chip / GPU space will make it progressively cheaper to train and run large models. Eventually the cost of making models equivalent in power to OpenAI's models drops geometrically to the point that many organizations can do it... maybe even eventually groups of individuals with crowdfunding.

OpenAI's current big spending is helping bootstrap this by creating huge demand for silicon, and that is deflationary in terms of the cost of compute. The more money gets dumped into making faster cheaper AI chips the cheaper it gets for someone else to train GPT-5+ competitors.

The question is whether there is a network effect moat similar to the strong network effect moats around OSes, social media, and platforms. I'm not convinced this will be the case with AI because AI is good at dealing with imprecision. Switching out OpenAI for Anthropic or Mistral or Google or an open model hosted on commodity cloud is potentially quite easy because you can just prompt the other model to behave the same way... assuming it's similar in power.

Wasn’t there also a bunch of telecom infrastructure created in the dot-com bubble, tangible products created, etc? Things like servers, telephone wires, underwater internet cables, tech-storefronts, internet satellites, etc.

Stopped clock…

2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpiZ0DkHeGE 2019: https://www.cadtm.org/spip.php?page=imprimer&id_article=1732...

[dead]

One interesting aspect of this is that, with the exception of OpenAI, all of the companies leading this boom generate massive amounts of income from other arms of their buinesses. I think this is one reason for the potentially longer run, since they can subsidize AI CapEx with these cash flows for quite a while.

It's usually not actually fraud. It's the amazon reinvesting back into growth, except the unit economics don't work if everyone cashes out at the same time, and if anyone starts cashing out the growth stops and everyone cashes out before it's too late.

Wasn't that change cancelled this summer?

They could try selling their services above cost.

If you can only continue to fund a venture using scam-like structures, then maybe it's time to re-evaluate what the goals and value prop of the unfundable venture is.

> Now Rivian can lose 5 billion a year and I don't hear anything about it, and OpenAI can lose 11 billion in a quarter and Microsoft

Rivian stock is down 90%, and I fairly regularly read financial news about it having bad earnings, stock going even lower, worst-in-industry reliability, etc etc.

I don't know why you don't hear about it, but it might be because it's already looking dead in the water so there's no additional news juice to squeeze out of it.

Rivian lost something like $5B in 2024, but they're on track to only lose $2.25B in 2025. That trend line is clear. In 2026 they release a much lower cost model, and a lot of that loss has been development of that model. They probably won't achieve profitability in 2026, but if they get their loss down to $1B in 2026, in 2027 we'll likely see them go net positive.

> like the WeWork CEO flying couches to offices in private jets

I found there was more than just couches on the WeWork private jets:

https://www.inverse.com/input/tech/weworks-adam-neumann-got-...

It reminds me a lot of the late 1990s.

We had an impressive new technology (the Web), and everyone could see it was going to change the world, which fueled a huge gold rush that turned into a speculative bubble. And yes, ultimately the Web did change the world and a lot of people made a lot of money off of it. But that largely happened later, after the bubble burst, and in ways that people didn't quite anticipate. Many of the companies people were making big bets on at the time are now fertile fodder for YouTube video essays on spectacular corporate failures, and many of the ones that are dominant now were either non-existent or had very little mindshare back in the late '90s.

For example, the same year the .com bubble burst, Google was a small new startup that failed to sell their search engine to Excite, one of the major Web portal sites at the time. Excite turned them down because they thought $750,000 was too high a price. 2 years later, after the dust had started to settle, Excite was bankrupt and Google was Google.

And things today sure do strike me as being very similar to things 25, 30 years ago. We've got an exciting new technology, we've got lots of hype and exuberant investment, we've got one side saying we're in a speculative bubble, and the other side saying no this technology is the real deal. And neither side really wants to listen to the more sober voices pointing out that both these things have been true at the same time many times in the past, so maybe it's possible for them to both be true at the same time in the present, too. And, as always, the people who are most confident in their ability to predict the future ultimately prove to be no more clairvoyant than the rest of us.

>and OpenAI can lose 11 billion in a quarter and Microsoft still backs them.

For Microsoft, and the other hyperscalers supporting OpenAI, they're all absolutely dependent on OpenAI's success. They can realistically survive through the difficult times, if the bubble bursts because of a minor player - for example if Coreweave or Mistral shuts down. But if the bubble bursts because the most visible symbol of AI's future collapses, the value-destruction for Microsoft's shareholders will be 100x larger than OpenAI's quarterly losses. The question for Microsoft is literally as fundamental as "do we want to wipe $1tn off our market cap, or eat $11bn losses per quarter for a few years?" and the answer is pretty straightforward.

Altman has played an absolute blinder by making the success of his company a near-existential issue for several of the largest companies to have ever existed.

> this feels a little like the WeWork CEO flying couches to offices in private jets

Fascinating! I unearthed the TL;DR for anyone else interested:

* WeWork purchased a $60 million Gulfstream G650ER private jet for Neumann's use.

* The G650ER was customized with two bedrooms and a conference table.

* Neumann used the jet extensively for global travel, meetings, and family trips.

* The jet was also used to transport items like a "sizable chunk" of marijuana in a cereal box, which might be worse and more negligent than couches.

Sources:

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/03/adam-neumann-re...

https://nypost.com/2021/07/17/the-shocking-ways-weworks-ex-c...

Very few industries are “deeply profitable” absent the illegal abuse of monopoly power

And did people listen to those "analyses" and dump Tesla, or its stock kept skyrocketing?

Altman was screwing / raping his sister so not quite sure who is worse.

ressentiment: the forum

The funds in USD were recovered because bitcoins value is 5x higher than it was when he got arrested.

I don't understand why you think it's OK to flagrantly violate financial laws for consumer protection, just because the bet got lucky?

My complaint about Ed Zitron is that he's _always_ shouting into the void about something. A lot of the issues he covers are legitimate and deserve the scorn he gives them but at some point it became hard for me to sort the signal from the noise.

Ed Zitron sucks because he constantly spitballs on easy to confirm topics and keeps being wrong in ways that should be trivial to check and fix. Case in point:

https://bsky.app/profile/notalawyer.bsky.social/post/3ltkami...

> Reality lies in the middle

The argument to moderation/middle ground fallacy is a fallacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation

> Depending on your POV OpenAI and the surrounding AI hype machine is at the extremes either the dawn of a new era

Eh, in a way they're not mutually exclusive. Look back at the dot com crash: it was all about things like online shopping, which we absolutely take for granted and use every day in 2025. Same for the video game crash in the 80s. They are both an overhyped bubble and and the dawn of a new era.