-109% of the time, it works every time…

Temu Anthropic (read: OpenAI) is so back… kinda.

Some snitches on the inside told Bloomberg that OpenAI’s quarterly revenue mooned past $10B for the first time in Q3. That’s up almost 50% from $6.7B in Q2, and nearly triple what it did a year ago. The numbers went out to investors on a call Tuesday. OpenAI declined to comment, because, of course. 

Friendly reminder, this is the same company that missed a metric fck ton of its own revenue targets earlier this year. Q2 revenue grew just 18% while Claude’s more than doubled, and back in May, Anthropic made OpenAI its b*tch with a $965B valuation to OpenAI’s $852B.

The Barry Wood of AI is putting up bigly top line numbers again. OpenAI got there with tighter pricing, a bunch of discounts, better models, and a bigger push into enterprise products and AI agents that do your work for you. Its ~50% growth also beat Anthropic’s, which slowed to about 47% from 140%+ in Q2. Rare W.

The bad news? OpenAI still loses more than a dollar for every dollar it brings in. Its adjusted operating margin improved from -150% to -109%, which, congrats? Meaning, OpenAI lost roughly $10.9B (on an adjusted operating basis) in a single quarter, up from about $10B in Q2.

Speaking of burning cash on compute… On a podcast last month, Sam Altman said your PC is hogging memory that would be put to better use in AI data centers. After Elon and the rest of the internet bodied him, Sam changed his X name to “Ram Altman” and tweeted “i want you to have so much ram lets build more.” Sure, Scam Ram.

And yes, OpenAI says it has over a billion users. It’s just that most of them are freeloaders like me on the free tier or the cheap plans. The real money is in enterprise, where Anthropic is way ahead.

For those keeping score at home (read: all of us), Anthropic did $17B in Q3, and says its run rate jumped $10B in October alone to $81B. OpenAI’s run rate is $50B. Friendly explainer, Anthropic counts sales its cloud partners make, while OpenAI only counts its own cut, so the gap is smaller than it looks.

Oh, and Anthropic is about to IPO at up to ~$1.4T. OpenAI is raising at $1.25T and pushed its own IPO to next year. Both also have to fight Microsoft (OpenAI’s sugar daddy) and a pile of cheap Chinese open-source models (read:  LLM’s, not spies… sup, Jensen), plus Meta, Amazon and Google.

Regardless, Anthropic rings the opening bell next week, and Sam’s still out here fighting the internet over RAM. Your move, @sama…

Until next time, friends! 

At the time of publishing, Stocks.News holds positions in Meta, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft as mentioned in the article.