you could not be more wrong, you cannot IPO if you say product is good enough. The whole point, the bet why its worth trillions is because they will reach AGI and "singularity" first, so the gap vs open source will only increase. If you say product is great as is, then you will be caught up and game over
In order to correctly make that decision, they must use the opportunity cost of selling that token. I'm pushing back at OPs claim that Anthropic must use internal cost to calculate that trade-off. They absolutely should use external selling price.
They are doing the calculation on if the $150K/person is worth it, and it probably is.
Their revenues have exploded, they are unit-profitable, they need to also invest in the future.
AI infrastructure is supply constrained, so you have to make a decision: how much do I allocate to training vs inference?
Do I use it all for inference and do no further training? If so, what risks does that expose me to?
It's supply constrained in terms of global hardware production capacity, but that's not how it works for any given company. If Anthropic wanted more GPUs for customers paying them enough money to outbid the next guy in the market for the finite number of GPUs then they would do that and get a higher percentage of the finite number of GPUs.
So the cost of using more internally is still their own cost, i.e. the price of being the high bidder on more compute resources, not the retail price they charge to customers.