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Are OpenAI and Anthropic losing money on inference?

(martinalderson.com)
507 points martinald | 1 comments | 28 Aug 25 10:15 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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sc68cal ◴[28 Aug 25 15:12 UTC] No.45053212[source]▶
This whole article is built off using DeepSeek R1, which is a huge premise that I don't think is correct. DeepSeek is much more efficient and I don't think it's a valid way to estimate what OpenAI and Anthropic's costs are.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/deep-impact/

Basically, DeepSeek is _very_ efficient at inference, and that was the whole reason why it shook the industry when it was released.

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1. boroboro4 ◴[28 Aug 25 15:17 UTC] No.45053283[source]▶
DeepSeek inference efficiency comes from two things: MoE and MLA attention. OpenAI was rumored to use MoE around GPT4 moment, I.e loooong time ago.

Given Gemini efficiency with long context I would bet their attention is very efficient too.

GPT OSS uses fp4, which DeepSeek doesn’t use yet btw.

So no, big labs aren’t behind DeepSeek in efficiency. Not by much at least.