> and that's profitable for OpenAI.

Reference?

"Profitable" means they're making more money than they're using, at this moment.

Are you implying openai is selling access to their API at a loss?

No, I would like facts, not assumptions. It's definitely not safe to assume they are making a profit, as a whole, or per transaction. It's more complicated than that.

Profit has a strict definition of $revenue - $cost, for a business operation as a whole, which leaves money in the bank at the end of the month.

They could be making more money for a single query than the cost of compute time for that single query, but that may not cover the engineering and idle servers. They could be running at a loss with the assumption that they can improve efficiency per transaction soon. They could be running at a "loss" because they're giving some of the compute away for free right now, to improve the training with the user responses. Or maybe they are making fistfuls of money. "Profitable" has a strict meaning, shouldn't be assumed, and definitely isn't required, at this point in their operation.

I'm very interested to know if they are profitable, at the moment, but I don't think that's been publicly disclosed yet, and I can't find anything. A reference is required.

I don't have a reference. I'm taking the very reasonable assumption that openai is making money on API calls based on how much they charge compared to others in this space, the favorable pricing they receive from Microsoft, their ability to constantly bring down the costs and push the savings to their consumers, their unwillingness to lower the cost of Dall-E even though it's more expensive than it's competitors.

Very reasonable assumptions. You will never get certainty, even if they say they're profitable maybe they're just lying for investors. If you see their bank account total go up every month maybe it's a ponzi scheme.

For my heuristics, if not profitable, at least close, and definitely a major success in acquiring market share and customer mind share.

So, because Fraud is possible, unfounded speculation is the best we have?

I've given plenty of evidence as to why it's a reasonable assumption. But doesn't seem like you have much access to nuance in your thinking.

There is a world in between, we cannot be sure of anything because of Fraud, and here is some rough guess work.

If you want to claim the latter as evidence then fair enough, I would call it speculation.

In either case there is no need to resort to petty insults.

It was not a petty insult. The options you gave are "fraud" or "unfounded speculation." Literally lacks any kind of nuance. What sort of nuance would you say you contributed?

I think it would be better to make it clear that something is an assumption rather than stating it as fact, to not add to the noise. In the world of tech (and any R&D heavy group), initially running at a loss is the norm, not the exception.