> Anthropic CEO has stated they have high margins on inference, so training is the big cost center.

I'm pretty sure that in corpo-speak "inference" excludes the cost of datacenter construction, GPUs and other hardware, manual data cleaning, R&D, administration, etc - basically everything except the power bill for inference.

I have absolutely no problem with companies that run inference only - plenty of them offer open models as a service - they're usefull and their accounting can be believed... but they don't have near $ Trillion valuations and they don't misallocate capital on a vast scale as the frontier models do.

The point of the OP is that closed models don't pay for themselves and, on the scale of the US economy, they provide minuscule economic advantages compared to the enormous investments they consume.

Well, training isn't going to end soon if these companies keep on competing with one another whilst being neck-and-neck, so I'm not sure why you would ignore the cost of training in the ROI calculation.

> Is it actually being sold at a steep discount? Anthropic CEO has stated they have high margins on inference, so training is the big cost center.

They're spending more than they're making. For the foreseeable future, saying "we could be profitable if we stopped training" if goofy, because they can't stop. If they do, no one will want to use their product because it will be overtaken by competitors within three months.

I get it that in 10 years all of this might peak and we're gonna be content using old models, but that'll be a very different landscape and Anthropic might not be a part of it anymore if they don't start making money before that.

Does the cumulative earnings from inference on a single model exceed its training costs?

That’s.. kinda the question.

Then why are they stopping people from having multiple max plans? If they are making such good margins on inference.