OpenAI and Anthropic aren't charities, so whatever cost they inccur for training will be passed down to the companies using the models. So you absolute should include it.
The problem is how it's framed:
Anthropic spends [...] about $2m of compute per employee per year against a likely all-in comp of $500k+.
The rest of the software market trails. The top 1% of companies spend $89k per engineer per year on AI
This framing makes no sense. The reason Anthropic spends so much on compute per employee is that they are building models. Anthropic employees aren't opening Claude Code and spending $2m in inference every year, so comparing it to other software companies, where AI expense is mostly inference, is completely incoherent.
Yes, the cost has to be passed down eventually, but it's not passed down to one company; it's passed down to all of Anthropic's customers, so the actual share of that money will be distributed among Anthropic's clients.
Look, I 100% agree with the idea that OpenAI and Anthropic are both unsustainable companies that have dug themselves so far into a debt hole that, most likely, the only way they'll be rescued is with government intervention, but this is still a terrible article.
Well … one was a non profit and I still can’t figure out how it kept the donations the tax benefits and because a trillion for profit company
> whatever cost they inccur for training will be passed down to the companies using the models
Assuming their investors win the bet they placed on them. Which isn't given.
Why can't we pass on the costs of OpenAI and Anthropic's training back to OpenAI and Anthropic?
Bandwidth isn't free, and all my life I've been told that piracy is theft.
OpenAI and Anthropic aren't charities, so whatever cost they inccur for training will be passed down to the companies using the models
You should, but with two important caveats. First, you don't know what their amortization schedule is like so you don't know what the impact on the pricing will be (are they going to pass the cost on over 5 years or over 20 years?), and second they may go bust before paying the cost down so they may not get a chance to pass it all on. If someone buys the company then they'll get a discount on the value, which means the training costs are just eaten by the investors.