They are doing R&D. I don't know what their other projects are. Most of their $12B in annual revenue is coming from GPT-5, so if we take your $2.7B figure for training GPT-5 at face value they have most likely already paid it back. If you figure GPT-5 is around for 6 months... the economics are straightforward.
Yes employees but the employees are working on R&D. I'm not saying all of their R&D is good, only that GPT-5 is clearly a profitable product, same as Gemini and Claude.
BRK (Why are investors split on earnings?). Because they want to screw my puts and my calls. Sure, 30% operational profit is not enough for greedier bastards than me :D
That's the margin for inference compute. It leaves out the costs of training, which are about 50% higher than inference. I know that you're including that in the broad category of "R&D and Capex" but everything we know about how these models work indicates that this will be an ongoing cost forever. You're banking on a model that doesn't have to be trained. That's science fiction.