Multiple reports this week raised questions about how much revenue OpenAI models really bring in, and how much those models cost the company to run. The Financial Times reported that OpenAI’s annualized revenue is approaching $50 billion, about $20 billion below the $70 billion figure widely reported in late September. OpenAI investors reportedly generated the gap by adjusting the company’s revenue figures to match how Anthropic counts revenue (Anthropic includes sales made through cloud partners such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, while OpenAI does not). US tech stocks fell after the report, with the Nasdaq 100 down 1.7%, and shares of Nvidia, Oracle, and Micron down 3% to 6%.
Separately, observers have claimed that GPT-6.1 Sol, OpenAI’s newest mid-tier model, is actually a more efficient version of GPT-6 Sol rather than an entirely new model. The thread cited a Microsoft Azure page suggesting that the model reuses GPT-6 Sol’s weights but works through each request in two inference passes instead of three, using less compute for a given query. This would explain why Sol is priced below Astra by Microsoft. Neither company has confirmed the claim, and the Microsoft page reporting the loop count has been taken down.
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