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by johnsimer6 hours ago |
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upvoteby waldopat5 hours ago|
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You may not like this sources, but both the tomato throwers to the green visor crowds agree they are losing money. How and when they make up the difference is up to speculation

https://www.wheresyoured.at/why-everybody-is-losing-money-on... https://www.economist.com/business/2025/12/29/openai-faces-a... https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openais-own-forecast-predicts...

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upvoteby mediaman35 minutes ago|
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The comment was with reference to inference, not total P&L.

Of course they are losing money in total. They are not, however, losing money per marginal token.

It’s trivial to see this by looking at the market clearing price of advanced open source models and comparing to the inference prices charged by OpenAI.

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upvoteby mh22661 hours ago|
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> green visor crowds

??

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upvoteby exitb5 hours ago|
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Maybe on the API, but I highly doubt that the coding agent subscription plans are profitable at the moment.
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upvoteby lawrenceyan2 hours ago|
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Build out distribution first and generate network effects.
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upvoteby tvink5 hours ago|
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For sure not
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upvoteby ehsanu16 hours ago|
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Could you substantiate that? That take into account training and staffing costs?
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upvoteby ihsw6 hours ago|
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The parent specifically said inference, which does not include training and staffing costs.
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upvoteby ehsanu143 minutes ago|
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But those aren't things you can really separate for proprietary models. Keeping inference running also requires staff, not just for the R&D.
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upvoteby lysace6 hours ago|
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That is the big question. Got reliable data on that?

(My gut feeling tells me Claude Code is currently underpriced with regards to inference costs. But that's just a gut feeling...)

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upvoteby tvink5 hours ago|
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https://www.wheresyoured.at/costs/

Their AWS spend being higher than their revenue might hint at the same.

Nobody has reliable data, I think it's fair to assume that even Anthropic is doing voodoo math to sleep at night.

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upvoteby simianwords5 hours ago|
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> If we subtract the cost of compute from revenue to calculate the gross margin (on an accounting basis),2 it seems to be about 50% — lower than the norm for software companies (where 60-80% is typical) but still higher than many industries.

https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/can-ai-companies-become-pr...

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upvoteby lysace5 hours ago|
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The context of that quote is OpenAI as a whole.
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