👀 Inside OpenAI's unit economics

A case study by Exponential View x Epoch AI

This post originally appeared in Exponential View.

At first glance, $6.1 billion sounds healthy, until you juxtapose it with the costs of running the GPT-5 bundle.

AI companies are being priced into the hundreds of billions. That forces one awkward question to the front: do the unit economics actually work?

Jevons’ paradox suggests that as tokens get cheaper, demand explodes. You’ve likely felt some version of this in the last year. But as usage grows, are these models actually profitable to run?

In our collaboration with Epoch AI, we tackle that question using OpenAI’s GPT-5 as the case study. What looks like a simple margin calculation is closer to a forensic exercise: we triangulate reported details, leaks, and Sam Altman’s own words to bracket plausible revenues and costs.

Here’s the breakdown.