[StrLght]

> Author: A paying Max 20x customer who's done subsidizing Anthropic's infrastructure problems

Shouldn't that be the other way around? Isn't every LLM provider losing money? Especially on premium subscriptions.

[bryanlarsen]

I don't think that's clear. They're certainly burning money, but that's mostly R&D: salaries and training compute. Once you remove those, it's unclear whether the AI companies would be losing money on just inference.

[dns_snek]

You can't "remove" costs willy nilly to make a company look profitable. Running an independent ISP is an extremely lucrative business if you gloss over the capex requirements of installing and maintaining the infrastructure.

[energy123]

There was some credible analysis that I don't have the link to which estimated 50% gross margins for OpenAI, largely eaten up by operational expenses. So not awful unit economics, but not good either.

Assuming that's even true, the big asterisk is uncertainty around efficiency gains in the future. The intelligence divided by cost ratio is changing very quickly. It is hard to make confident predictions more than 3 months out.

[smashah]

Is that even publicly knowable? In sure they're not doing charity with their subscription despite our perceptions.

[g947o]

https://x.com/sama/status/1876104315296968813?lang=en