To answer question one, researchers created a case study they called the GPT-5 bundle, which they said included all of OpenAI’s offerings available during GPT-5’s lifetime as the flagship model, including GPT-5 and GPT-5.1, GPT-4o, ChatGPT, and the API, and estimated the revenue from and costs of running the bundle. All numbers gathered were based on sources of information that included claims by OpenAI and its staff, and reporting by media outlets, primarily The Information, CNBC, and the Wall Street Journal.
The revenue estimate, they said, “is relatively straightforward”. Since the bundle included all of OpenAI’s models, it was the company’s total revenue over GPT-5’s lifetime from August to December last year: $6.1 billion.
And, they pointed out, “at first glance, $6.1 billion sounds healthy, until you juxtapose it with the costs of running the GPT-5 bundle.” These costs come from four main sources, the report said, the first of which is inference compute at a cost of $3.2 billion. That number is based on public estimates of OpenAI’s total inference compute spend in 2025, and assumes that the allocation of compute during GPT-5’s tenure was proportional to the fraction of the year’s revenue generated in that period.
