[Esophagus4]

I always assumed that with inference being so cheap, my subscription fees were paying for training costs, not inference.

[simonw]

Anthropic and OpenAI are both well documented as losing billions of dollars a year because their revenue doesn't cover their R&D and training costs, but that doesn't mean their revenue doesn't cover their inference costs.

[overgard]

Does it matter if they can't ever stop training though? Like, this argument usually seems to imply that training is a one-off, not an ongoing process. I could save a lot of money if I stopped eating, but it'd be a short lived experiment.

I'll be convinced they're actually making money when they stop asking for $30 billion funding rounds. None of that money is free! Whoever is giving them that money wants a return on their investment, somehow.

[vrighter]

Models are fixed. They do not learn post training.

Which means that training needs to be ongoing. So the revenue covers the inference? So what? All that means is that it doesn't cover your costs and you're operating at a loss. Because it doesn't cover the training that you can't stop doing either.

[beAbU]

Is inference really that cheap? Why can't I do it at home with a reasonable amount of money?

[mcosta]

Capex vs opex?

[smashed]

Doubtful