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by roadside_picnic9 hours ago |
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upvoteby ReliantGuyZ8 hours ago|
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And if you can run those strong models at home for free, why would hosting them be a successful business for any of these providers?

Profitable maybe, in terms of having low costs, but why pay Google or whoever when you can do it yourself for cheaper/"free"?

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upvoteby HDThoreaun8 hours ago|
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If you can run your server at home for free why would hosting it be a successful business for any of these propviders?
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upvoteby overrun116 hours ago|
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Arguably nothing even has to change with training for this to be sustainable. Dario has claimed that Anthropic is profitable on a per training run basis. They aren't profitable because they choose to keep investing in increasingly large training runs.
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upvoteby dsdsfaa4 hours ago|
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Cut the crap.

The value of the firm's operating assets = EBIT(1-t) - Reinvestment

You (Anthropic) want that sky-high valuation? Accept reinvestment is part of the equation.

If they decide to stop reinvesting, then they are as good as dead.

Moreover, they clearly are not re-investing cash flows from operations. Why do you think they are continually raising money? Lmao.

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upvoteby LetsGetTechnicl8 hours ago|
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If it's profitable, why haven't they reported any profits? People like Ed Zitron have done the math and it just doesn't add up. I mean he just published this piece today: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-is-too-expensive/
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upvoteby anthonypasq8 hours ago|
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Amazon was unprofitable for over a decade, and they were public. Theres no incentive to be profitable as a private company if you can continue to raise money.

Ed Zitron and Gary Marcus are... confused.

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upvoteby mynameisash7 hours ago|
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> Amazon was unprofitable for over a decade, and they were public.

Amazon was unprofitable because they poured their revenue into growth. On paper, they were in the red, but everyone - especially investors - saw what was going to happen, given their trajectory.

Is it the case that any of these AI companies are actually making a ton of money and growing accordingly? AFAICT, we've just got [a] big players like Google that can subsidize AI in the hopes of waiting everyone else out and [b] private companies raising capital in the hopes that when the market returns to rationality, they may be solvent.

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upvoteby overrun116 hours ago|
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Yes that is exactly what is happening. OpenAI and Anthropic are the fastest growing companies by revenue ever and their gross profit margins are healthy.
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upvoteby mynameisash6 hours ago|
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According to this article[0]:

> HSBC Global Investment Research projects that OpenAI still won’t be profitable by 2030, even though its consumer base will grow by that point to comprise some 44% of the world’s adult population (up from 10% in 2025). Beyond that, it will need at least another $207 billion of compute to keep up with its growth plans.

This article is from six months ago. Was HSBC wrong; did something dramatically change in the last six months; is OpenAI not, in fact, profitable?, or are they in fact doing well but doing a huge investment (as was the case with Amazon 25ish years ago)?

I genuinely do not know, but my impression is that they're burning investment capital trying to compete with others' investment capital and Google's bottomless pockets.

[0] https://fortune.com/2025/11/26/is-openai-profitable-forecast...

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upvoteby LetsGetTechnicl3 hours ago|
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Also OpenAI somehow having 44% of the world’s population as its customer base is a plainly absurd goal and will never happen, not in 5 years
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upvoteby dsdsfaa4 hours ago|
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and to make matters worse, they are massively over-valued.

Whoever buys the stock at a richly priced 1tn at ipo is a bozo lmao. I know I know, index funds will be forced to hold it bypassing the 1 year rule. Disaster already.

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upvoteby LetsGetTechnicl3 hours ago|
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Then why do they constantly need more and more funding from VC and Google and MS and NVIDIA? Why is it all circular dealing? Why aren’t there smaller AI startups running these smaller, “profitable” models?
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upvoteby timmytokyo7 hours ago|
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But I've been told here -- over and over again -- that the cost of inference was going to go down as the technology matured.

The trend lines are going in the opposite direction.

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upvoteby goosejuice8 hours ago|
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His entire brand is that the AI bubble will burst. By his account it was supposed to have several times by now. Like the doomers, it's not if it's when and they have to keep pushing back their predictions. Funny how both camps can be so confident. Alas, that's how they get eyes, ears and dollars.

That's not to say they will be or are wrong, it's just that they aren't exactly unbiased, or humble, sources.

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upvoteby booty8 hours ago|
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Yeah, at this point I think the worst-case scenario for OpenAI/Anthropic/etc is to slow down frontier model development and focus on tooling and services, as opposed to imploding completely and bursting the economic bubble. I hope?
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