The only reason OpenAI and Anthropic are making a loss is due to training new models to keep up with competition - not because the industry is flawed in terms of business model.
> The only reason OpenAI and Anthropic are making a loss is due to training new models to keep up with competition - not because the industry is flawed in terms of business model.
So in other words they are not profitable? Like you cant say they are profitable and then in the next sentence say they make a loss. That is not how profit works.
The point is that the model is already immensely profitable. There is no fundamental reason why AI isn't profitable. It already is.
Insane competition does not last forever. When chip manufacturing first started, there were dozens of companies that had fabs that made compute chips. Nowadays, only TSMC is viable. Samsung and Intel survived because of geopolitics.
> Is that not self evident by the insane revenue from frontier labs?
No...? Of course not?
Because revenue is only one side of the equation. Did you ever look at total cumulative OPEX and CAPEX, and how long it will take them to even just break even at current growth?
They're likely over $80b ARR by now. They'll be at $800b ARR next year at the same rate. Let's say their growth gets cut down to 3x instead of 10x - that's still $240b ARR by this time next year.
When you are growing so fast, you don't need to make a net profit. You just need to make sure your unit economics are good - which it seems like they are given reports that their gross margins are at 60-70%.
> They're likely over $80b ARR by now. They'll be at $800b ARR next year at the same rate.
And they will be 800 trilion ARR in a couple of years, following that same rate! 8 quadrillion by 2029!
> When you are growing so fast, you don't need to make a net profit. You just need to make sure your unit economics are good - which it seems like they are given reports that their gross margins are at 60-70%.
If their margins were anywhere near this good, they wouldn't need to raise so much money so often.
If you create a machine that turns 1 dollar into 3 dollars, you don't dillute your ownership of the machine, you use your fabulous profits to expand your machine's capabilities.
If their margins were anywhere near this good, they wouldn't need to raise so much money so often.
Why not? They are reinvesting into growth. There isn't a clear winner yet and Anthropic wants to make sure it is one of them. Taking a profit now while letting OpenAI take your marketshare and train better models is not very smart.
Or they bleed money like crazy, and their margins are pretty awful. Which is the correct answer.
Your $200 subscription is a major net loss for them. The vast majority that pays for that would cancel in a heartbeat the moment they had to pay API prices. Which may or may not be profitable, I am not entirely sure. But for the sake of argument, let's assume that it is.
Wihout insight on how much enterprise is paying, it is impossible to draw any conclusions. Unless you have any access to their contracts and are willing to share evidence? I find that highly unlikely.
People here throw around crazy numbers - the dude above was claiming they have some insane good margins, numberd that he took out of his ass.
The only evidence I have is that they are incredibly unprofitable, and they keep raising insane amounts of capital like crazy.
There was a leak sometime ago that they were EBITDA positive during a quarter where they didn't pay for part of their compute. And EBITDA is a cute metric to use when depreciation is actually very important to them, as a model from a year or so ago is nearly worthless.
serving models is very profitable (70%+) but the issue is you need to invest in training the next iteration. but so far all of anthropics models have been profitable fully loaded
the vast majority of the labs revenue is from enterprise api usage (theres public sources from the information and ramp). but the risk there is customer concentration, where most of the revenue comes from other tech companies and a chunk of it is from foreign labs distilling
so i am drawing a conclusion that the labs' business model is good, maybe not as great as boosters think it is. if they make real progress on the biosciences like drug discovery that could turn it into an amazing business
This is not evidence. This is random people speculating on Anthropic's margins without any real evidence.
Just because it is on some blog post, it does not make it true.
I wasted the time to read the first blog post. It considers 100% utilization over the course of years to calculate an estimation, and it did not consider depreciation for the model itself. That thing is extremely extensive to create, and after a relatively short amount of time is considered outdated.
Are we still calculated $200 subscription token spend based on their highly inflated API token cost and then concluding that they must be losing money on all $200 subscriptions?
Sure, there is revenue, and market valuation. Is there _profits_ in frontier models ?
What is the horizon for openai and anthropic to _make_ money ? Will they achieve that by charging more for frontier models, or investing slightly less in training frontier models, etc... ?
