Lol, good one, who actually thinks AI companies are profitable?

Exactly. My terminology might not be correct, but my point is that their books can be perfectly balanced, and they can also be losing a shit-ton of money, as long as investors keep shoveling money in.

I’m not an accountant, but you can certainly balance books while showing a loss. Double-entry bookkeeping simply means that every transaction has two parts, and “balancing” simply means that all the transactions cancel out properly.

I joke with my accountant friends that their entire job is counting to zero.

That’s quite easy, the books are balanced, there are just more debits than credits. “Balancing the books” doesn’t mean that the net result is zero, it means that all the money going in and going out is accounted for.

OpenAI can keep bleeding money as long as there are fools willing to fund it in exchange for the illusion of future profits.