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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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pityJuke ◴[28 Aug 25 13:26 UTC] No.45051892[source]▶
From https://www.theverge.com/command-line-newsletter/759897/sam-..., Sam Altman said:

> “If we didn’t pay for training, we’d be a very profitable company.”

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Aurornis ◴[28 Aug 25 14:17 UTC] No.45052467[source]▶
Exactly. All of the claims that OpenAI is losing money on every request are wrong. OpenAI hasn’t even unlocked all of their possible revenue opportunities from the free tier such as ads (like Google search), affiliate links, and other services.

There’s also a lot of comments in this thread who want LLM companies to fail for different reasons, so they’re projecting that wish on to imagined unit economics.

I’m having flashbacks to all of the conversations about Uber and claims that it was going to collapse as soon as the investment money ran out. Then Uber gradually transitioned to profitability and the critics moved to using the same shtick on AI companies.

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1. overgard ◴[28 Aug 25 17:20 UTC] No.45054685[source]▶
If they're profitable, why on earth are they seeking crazy amounts of investment month after month? It seems like they'll raise 10 billion one month, and then immediately turn around and raise another 10 billion a month or two after that. If it's for training, it seems like a waste of money since GPT-5 doesn't seem like it's that much of an improvement.