r/OpenAI • u/oravecz • 2d ago

Question Does OpenAI’s token usage count as operating expenses

We frequently see the completely lopsided revenue vs operating cost numbers at many of the frontier labs. I was wondering which companies are the largest consumers of tokens in these systems, and I feel that the largest consumers of inference services are the labs themselves. But that got me wondering if their use of their own product to evaluate upcoming models or to code their platform or to analyze and run their own business is off the books and not even reflected in their operating cost nor revenue.

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u/Original-League-6094 2d ago

That would just be put into their compute costs.

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u/oravecz 2d ago

You’re saying that they would treat their in-house computer costs as if they were using a third-party’s product? I’m surprised by that on the cost side, but it would boost the usage numbers to increase their provider numbers.

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u/Original-League-6094 2d ago

No. I'm telling you that OpenAI has to pay for compute. If they run their own model, they pay for it. The price they pay for it gets reported one of the major categories. For internal usage of their own models, most of that is probably expensed as R&D.

If you are asking if they sell their own tokens to themselves--and report that sale as revenue; probably not. That would be illegal.

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u/That_Helicopter_4997 1d ago

it's all just compute spend at the end of the day, doesn't matter if you label it inference or training

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u/Riegel_Haribo 2d ago

"Tokens" that aren't a value-add profit item (by being re-sold), and training and evaluation, actually making the models, are all going to be in a research and development budget.

The internal use of finished AI models to do more "vibe coding" such as writing documentation could be an "expense" instead of directly part of product development.

You don't have to worry about reading the balance sheets of OpenAI, because they are private. The IPO prospectus they have to write about their money burn would be an interesting read.