alt Hacker News> until inference becomes much cheaper these companies cannot be profitable. Some mega-players will pay the API token price, but most will not.
This is often repeated but comes from ignorance mostly. You have * zero * reason to believe inference is costly other than just vibes. If you go by data and intuitions - the margins are high.
This kind of thinking really reinforces my belief that people have no idea and are using this whole [AI is not profitable and too costly] thing as a cathartic way to deal with immense progress.
We know that inference cost is very significant, as he shows for example in this piece.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/
However, it needs to be said that he received those numbers. I personally have quite a few issues with him, but there's no reason to doubt his journalistic integrity. Because of that, I believe he reports truthfully on data he receives by informants.
Additionally, none of the frontier models actually publicly talks about inference costs in anything but broad, "let's just forget that"-like takes. Which does not exactly spark confidence.
I'm eagerly awaiting anthropic's public disclosure of their financial details. That should be rather interesting in any case and finally put the inference-discussion to rest.