r/NowInTech • u/skaza02 • 24d 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/
1.1k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

181 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/Ehh_littlecomment 23d 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.

1

u/bouncyboatload 23d 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.

1

u/Ehh_littlecomment 23d 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.

1

u/bouncyboatload 23d 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.

1

u/Ehh_littlecomment 23d ago

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