alt Hacker News> the big providers are charging full freight for inference.
Except they're not. Anthropic's claims of temporary profitability line up exactly with when SpaceX is giving them discounted compute, OpenAI's such a shitfest they threw the CFO off the glass cliff for daring to push back against the IPO. "Profitable on inference" is an unsubstantiated rumour.
Just look at the copilot changes. Demand switching to other providers immediately when prices rise, and there's not even certainty that the new copilot prices cover costs.
> They might not make back the money from training
This is an understatement. With all the datacenter buildout, they need trillions. For the investors get their money back and the bubble to not implode, they functionally need to unemploy everyone in the US.
If the AI dream is real, society just breaks.
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> "Profitable on inference" is an unsubstantiated rumour.
So is "unprofitable on inference".
Thankfully we should find out for real as soon as those S-1 documents arrive.
The pricing on Open router is clear. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all garner a massive premium over deepseek and qwen. There's no other realistic explanation except that they're making bank.
>For the investors get their money back and the bubble to not implode, they functionally need to unemploy everyone in the US.
More like $75/mo per user for the next 5-10 years if they can get 5% of the global population to pay that.
Anthropic is a five year old startup, if they can be profitable that quickly in the AI space, even if only temporarily, I'm not really seeing the problem?
These companies are going all in and growing rapidly, because they want to dominate the market and since it is difficult to differentiate between competitors, even being third place is a terrible place to be in the consumer facing AI space.
Unemploying everyone was what openai described as their success condition when it was founded a decade ago. There was a q&a on their website that said "How will you know when you have reached AGI? When the system performs most or all economically valuable work." Lots of people thought they were joking, or it was marketing, but they were 100% serious from the first.