OpenAI's annualized revenue hits $10 billion, up from $5.5 billion in December 2024

Can someone tell me if this is bad, good or normal?

They love pointing out their revenue instead of their profit. It they were truly making money, you’d think they’d refer to their profit instead.
- Revenue is a standard unit of measurement for any venture backed business because it gauges interest and growth better than profit does
It's...weird? Not normal, anyway.
Usually $10 billion worth of revenue has obvious products, services and outcomes it to point to.
$10 billion is a difficult to understand amount of money, and unusual for a relatively new software as a service company.
The first iPhone release completely transformed society within a few years...and earned about 1/10th that much revenue (6 million units at $700.00, if I've got my sums right). (Although I imagine Apple makes much more from the app store, than the devices.)
$10 billion is about 1/4 of the annual revenue of SalesForce, one of the most successful software as a service companies. SalesForce generates sales, which companies tend to be quite happy to pay for, of course.
So OpenAI doubling in revenue and hitting those kinds of numbers this soon is, odd. Unexpected.
To speculate a bit, it may be the kind of fortune enjoyed by folks who sold mining equipment to gold diggers during the gold rush.
There is presumably lots of speculative investment money flowing to companies that are promising big rewards from novel applications of the OpenAI technology. Of course they have to purchase the technology today, to deliver the huge novel profits next year...
I base this speculation the observation that there's usually sizeable amounts of money chasing hot new technologies.
- Thats less than 50 million GPT plus subscriptions, even fewer if you factor in the more expensive subscriptions. Thats alot of subscriptions, but not an implausible number.
- Do you think OpenAI could be falsifying data, laundering money, or is it just that investors are hyped about AI?
- 6 million units at $700 a pop is $4.2 billion in revenue. Much closer to 1/2 of $10 billion than 1/10.
  Apple has never made more money from the App Store than from iPhone hardware sales. When the iPhone launched the App Store didn’t exist yet. Over time, Apple’s revenue from services (including the App Store) has grown dramatically to around $26 billion per quarter today, though that is still less than what they earn in iPhone sales (a bit over $50 billion per quarter in 2024).