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cs702today at 2:10 PM1 replyview on HN

Some frontier labs are reporting positive "adjusted EBITDA" (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, with extra adjustments to make the figure positive).

Free cash flow (operating profit less investment), actual cash coming in, is deeply in the red.

EBITDA can be a sensible measure of profitability when there isn't much need for additional investment. That doesn't seem to be the case with these operators. They need to invest aggressively to avoid losing customers to competitors. All of these operators have made multi-year commitments to invest more in infrastructure. In addition, they have guaranteed quite a bit of debt to fund it.

Maybe it all will work out fine (and I sure hope it does!), but I didn't see any hard data from the OP, or from you, supporting that view.


Replies

0cf8612b2e1etoday at 2:59 PM

EBITDA might make sense for the resellers who package up open weight models and sell inference. It is not appropriate for the labs who have billions in debt for RAM, new data centers, gobbling up competitors, etc.

Those real debt obligations are going to want to be paid back.