The shovel salesmen in this case are the likes of Nvidia, Huggingface and Runpod who are on the receiving end of the billions that AI model salesmen are spending to make millions in revenue. HF are one of the vanishingly few AI-centric startups who claim to already be profitable, because they're positioned as a money sink for the other AI-centric startups who are bleeding cash.
5 billions in losses on 3.7 billions in revenue. So yes OpenAI is losing money, but they are looking at a valuation of 150 billion, so they could easily get investors to fund the losses, but of cause the case for investors has to be “invest and you can make a profit” which can be a tough sell if the mission isn’t aligned with making a profit for the company.
For the true believers that's just a temporary setback on the way to becoming trillionaires though.