The shovel salesmen in this case are the likes of Nvidia, Huggingface and Runpod who are on the receiving end of the billions that AI model salesmen are spending to make millions in revenue. HF are one of the vanishingly few AI-centric startups who claim to already be profitable, because they're positioned as a money sink for the other AI-centric startups who are bleeding cash.
5 billions in losses on 3.7 billions in revenue. So yes OpenAI is losing money, but they are looking at a valuation of 150 billion, so they could easily get investors to fund the losses, but of cause the case for investors has to be “invest and you can make a profit” which can be a tough sell if the mission isn’t aligned with making a profit for the company.
OpenAI is losing billions in the way Uber lost billions - through poor management.
When/if Altman ever gets out of the way like Travis K did with Uber then the real business people can come in and run the company correctly. Exactly like what happened with Uber - who never turned a profit under that leadership in the US and had their lunch eaten by a Chinese knock-off for years abroad. Can't have spoiled brats in charge, they have no experience and are wasteful and impulsive. Especially like Altman who has no engineering talent either. What is his purpose in OpenAI? He can't do anything.
