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lovich • yesterday at 11:06 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

What AI lab is profitable?

And in before ‘JumpCrissCross chimes in about inference being profitable while ignoring all the investment costs needed to get inference to where it is.


Replies

cosmicgadget • yesterday at 11:34 PM

Profitability is an awfully narrow metric.

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redwood • yesterday at 11:07 PM

Anthropic as of a few months ago.

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adventured • yesterday at 11:54 PM

Why have they needed to worry about profitability?

They have been chasing extreme growth with cheap money. That enabled them to hyper scale at a pace the world has rarely seen before. They have made the correct choice so far.

The absolute dumbest thing they could have done up to this point is slow down to try to turn a profit. They have not needed to. Market capture is the sole thing they should be focused on. Here's a hint: how many users does GPT have now versus three years ago?

There appears to be very widespread confusion about what purpose turning a profit serves and how business operations actually work.

Go back in time and tell Uber in ~2013-2015 that it needs to immediately become profitable and not focus on capturing the market.

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