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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: 0.256s | source
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noodletheworld ◴[28 Aug 25 15:25 UTC] No.45053394[source]▶
Huh.

I feel oddly skeptical about this article; I can't specifically argue the numbers, since I have no idea, but... there are some decent open source models; they're not state of the art, but if inference is this cheap then why aren't there multiple API providers offering models at dirt cheap prices?

The only cheap-ass providers I've seen only run tiny models. Where's my cheap deepseek-R1?

Surely if its this cheap, and we're talking massive margins according to this, I should be able to get a cheap / run my own 600B param model.

Am I missing something?

It seems that reality (ie. the absence of people actually doing things this cheap) is the biggest critic of this set of calculations.

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1. brokencode ◴[28 Aug 25 15:29 UTC] No.45053436[source]▶
I also have no idea on the numbers. But I do know that these same companies are pouring many billions of dollars into training models, paying very expensive staff, and building out infrastructure. These costs would need to be factored in to come up with the actual profit margins.