Rumours have been in abundance since GPT-4 came out due to on the lack of clarity, but that lack of clarity seems to also exist within the companies themselves.

OpenAI and Anthropic certainly seem up be doing a lot of product stuff, but at the same time the only reason people have for saying OpenAI not making a profit is all the money they're also spending on training new models — I've yet to use o1, it's still in beta and is only 2 months old (how long was gmail in "beta", 5 years?)

I also don't know how much self-training they do, training on signals from the model's output and how users rate that output, only that (1) it's more then none, that (2) some models like Phi-3 use at least some synthetic data[0], and (3) that making a model to predict how users will rate the output was one of the previous big breakthroughs.

If they were to train on almost all their own output, and estimaing API costs as approximately actual costs, and given the claimed[1] public financial statements, that's in the order of a quadrillion (1e15) tokens, compared to the mere ~1e13 claimed for some of the larger models.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.14219

[1] I've not found the official sources nor do I know where to look for them, all I see are news websites reporting on the numbers without giving citations I can chase up