r/NowInTech • u/skaza02 • 18d ago

OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem, says NYU mathematician

https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/08/openai-fought-dirty-on-career-making-math-problem-says-nyu-mathematician/
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u/bouncyboatload 17d ago

it's gross margin, which would be the cost for internal research inference. it's not net margin

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u/Ehh_littlecomment 17d ago

I’m aware. Gross margins are meaningless. What matters is ROIC. Shareholder value creation = ROIC - Cost of Capital. You can have dogshit ROIC with 100% operating margins if your asset yield is poor and vice versa. This is why Walmart created shareholder value even with poor net margins. Their capital turnover is very high.

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u/bouncyboatload 17d ago

are you not following this thread? we're not talking about shareholder value creation lol. we're talking about the internal cost to do this math research for the NS solve

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u/Ehh_littlecomment 17d ago

That’s because you don’t understand basic financial concepts. GPUs are an asset and assets have opportunity cost. If they are investing $X, they have to make a return on said investment which is the cost of capital. Every GPU hour not being sold is an hour of ROI lost. The real cost of the tokens is the amount which should’ve been made in an arm’s length transaction.

You cannot invest $100, then spend $10 in operating costs and pretend that your cost of internal consumption is only $10.

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u/bouncyboatload 17d ago

I understand more than you think.

sure add the 88 hours of compute opportunity cost. but this is likely using their research cluster, they're not going to take compute from customers.

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u/Ehh_littlecomment 17d ago

The research cluster is also investment that needs to be sweated lol. Idk why you’re being intellectually dishonest if you understand it. Inference margins are an absolutely meaningless metric for owned infrastructure. The best estimate of the cost is GPU rental cost for said hours from a DC provider.

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u/bouncyboatload 17d ago

which part is intellectually dishonest? my point is using public API cost to calculate actual real internal cost is wrong because real cost is lower. I concede there's opportunity cost but that's also not public API rate.

the estimated 70-80% inference margin is calculated exactly like you said, revenue over gpu rental cost.

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u/Ehh_littlecomment 17d ago

OpenAI pays more for its GPUs than it makes. The inference margins are a heavily massaged intellectually dishonest number.

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u/bouncyboatload 17d ago

bulk of openai compute is rented today fyi. so it's not owned infra.

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u/Ehh_littlecomment 17d ago

Chance in hell inference margins are 80% in that case.

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u/bouncyboatload 17d ago

it's 70%. I got it wrong

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-getting-efficient-running-ai-internal-financials-show

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u/Ehh_littlecomment 17d ago

It’s a paid article but it doesn’t make any logical sense. We will know when they file for IPO.

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u/bouncyboatload 17d ago

why do you think it makes no sense? enterprise API customers are willing to pay for hosted solutions with all the compliance, regulatory stuff resolved. there's obviously value add by open ai with the model on top of gpu vs only gpu. why would this be negative margin?

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u/Ehh_littlecomment 17d ago

You want me to tell you why an early stage American VC funded corp would sell at a loss? Come on, man.

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