alt Hacker NewsThey'll be competing on price now with openAI, google, and Amazon eventually.
AI is just a compute commodity with a value add.
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Are any of the AI companies selling their services at a profit or are we all being subsidized by investor money that is about to need to be paid back?
This is naive. AI is one of those few things that does have moat. Its shockingly hard to hire people and create a good company culture that does frontier training. There's only like 3-4 labs in the world and the rest are distilling.
Even in next 3-4 years, the company that has the best ecosystem of researchers, culture, shared knowledge and processes will be able to churn out models in a way that can't be replicated.
i think its a lot deeper than that, compared to deepseek-4.1-flash, glm-5.3-flash and the recent minimax-m3.1-flash [0], the comparison in price (15x cheaper inference cost) and the productivity gains are very similar if not more profound depending your prompt topic (cyber, biochem, etc)
Anthropic and OpenAI own no compute. Amazon has no models.
So that leaves...