🔮 X-raying OpenAI’s unit economics

Notes from our live discussion

This post originally appeared in Exponential View.

“If you look at how much they spent on R&D in the four months before they released GPT-5, that quantity was likely larger than what they made in gross profits during the entire tenure of GPT-5 and GPT-5.2.”

AI companies are being valued in the hundreds of billions. $650 billion in capital expenditure commitments are being made by big tech for 2026. Yet one question remains unanswered: does it make economic sense?

We recently partnered with Epoch AI to analyze GPT-5’s unit economics, and figure out whether frontier models can be profitable (full breakdown here).

To dig deeper into what our results tell us about the wider industry, we hosted a live conversation last week between myself (Azeem Azhar), Hannah Petrovic, Jaime Sevilla, moderated by Matt Robinson.

We cover:

• The research findings,

• Possible paths to profitability,

• OpenAI vs Anthropic playbook,

• Winning the enterprise

• Why this research made some bulls more pessimistic

• What the market gets wrong.

Watch here:

Listen here:

Or read our notes: