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jrflotoday at 1:53 PM3 repliesview on HN

The luna cost cuts were real though, not a one time promotion or something, due to some optimization (probably distillation?) that openai did.


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mattalextoday at 3:46 PM

You assume that openai's inference is profitable and that they aren't just trying to bolster revenue before their IPO.

The only indication that openai is profitable comes from openai (whom I wouldn't trust with any statement, especially when it comes to profitability).

In fact there is evidence that inference is not profitable simply because the rate of losses doesn't seem to reduce as revenue increases: if inference had great margins, we would expect that as revenues increase, the amount of spend on training reduces as a fraction of total expenses. Since the loss-making fixed costs shrink as a fraction compared to the profitable inference, we should expect profitability to rise with total revenue.

However, all leaks of openai's numbers seem to suggest the opposite: as revenues increase so do the losses.

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throwaw12today at 2:10 PM

what if it was because of quantization and they haven't released the new benchmarks for it?

Anything which changes the model needs new benchmarks I guess to compare with other models, otherwise you can benchmark Fable, and distill it to student model and keep claiming this is the Fable model

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QwenGlazer9000today at 1:57 PM

Was it?

Given the timing, I think they A. shat their pants since Deepseek flash just came out with insane pricing before the price hikes, and B. Anthropic is really struggling in model tiers below opus.

It was smart for them to cut prices regardless of whether they had 80% efficiency gains or not