OpenAI told investors its annualised revenue was about $20B below earlier reports
- OpenAI told investors its annualised revenue was approaching $50bn at the end of September, about $20bn below the $70bn that the FT and other outlets reported late last month from earlier investor information.
- The gap came from investors trying to compare OpenAI with Anthropic, which counts sales through cloud partners such as AWS and Google Cloud, while OpenAI does not.
- Efforts to gross up OpenAI's figure led to reports of $40bn in August, and the company later said revenue grew more than 70 percent to reach the $70bn figure.
- The metric is the main gauge of AI demand, and it underpins large infrastructure spending and the growth of public equity markets.
Hacker News opinions
Apparently they overstated revenue to compare with Anthropic. The article says the two calculate it differently: Anthropic counts sales through AWS and Google Cloud, OpenAI doesn't.
Obviously not the same as lying, but Anthropic juiced its numbers too with verbose models. My org's API spend tripled from July to August, then dropped back in September.
Just clarifying, that quote blames OpenAI's investors, not OpenAI itself.
I'm pretty sure both companies are lying about revenue. Annualised numbers are easy to inflate.
Not a finance guy, but 'gross up' might just mean how the number is counted. Like Anthropic reporting before revenue share and listing the share as a separate expense.
Take your best day and multiply by 365. Startups do this all the time.
We've got a roughly $1 trillion private company with almost no numbers. Nobody forced OpenAI to stay private, private credit and VC made it easy.
Nobody is quiet about doing well. If they were doing well they'd have IPO'd already.
Annualised revenue is basically one good day multiplied up. Calling that revenue is bullshit.
Does this line up with what Zitron was complaining about? He's wrong on some stuff, like LLMs not being useful, but his magic accounting and datacenter points look solid.