Are OpenAI and Anthropic losing money on inference?

With the heat turning up on AI companies to explain how they will land on a viable business model some of this is starting to look like WeWork’s “Community Adjusted EBITA” arguments of “hey if you ignore where we’re losing money, we’re not losing money!” that they made right before imploding.

I think most folks understand that pure inference in a vacuum is likely cash flow positive, but that’s not why folks are asking increasingly tough questions on the financial health of these enterprises.

A fast growing venture backed startup doing frontier R&D should be losing money overall.

If they weren’t losing money, they wouldn’t be spending enough on R&D. This isn’t some gotcha. It’s what the investors want right now.