OpenAI’s losses roughly doubled to around $540 million last year as it developed ChatGPT and hired key employees from Google, according to three people with knowledge of the startup’s financials. The previously unreported figure reflects the steep costs of training its machine-learning models during the period before it started selling access to the chatbot.
Even as revenue has picked up—reaching an annual pace of hundreds of millions of dollars just weeks after OpenAI launched a paid version of the chatbot in February—those costs are likely to keep rising as more customers use…