alt Hacker NewsDo we know they are making a profit though? They could be subsidizing use to build market share the same way. They might not have billions, but at the volumes they are selling maybe they’ve got the cash to do it.
Even if they are “profitable” how many Uber drivers are “profitable” because they aren’t correctly calculating asset depreciation. Maybe these guys are doing the same thing.
Maybe it’s a lot of people who already had GPUs for crypto mining, and they’ve moved over to this, so that if they need to grow and buy new GPUs the costs would dramatically grow.
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> subsidizing use to build market share the same way
To an extent maybe, but that market is almost entirely commoditized already. Besides Cerebras and maybe Groq (which already charge a slight premium) all the other providers are more less interchangeable.
> Maybe it’s a lot of people who already had GPUs for crypto mining
I’m not sure the type of GPUs that were most popular for crypto are at all useful for LLMs?
also, it's very much possible that the chinese companies get heavy investments from the state. Since it's very hard to get this info we have no idea wether they really make a profit or not.