Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the link. There's not much of an argument here from Ed, though, besides that it's an unusual way to view or report margins. But it's not that unusual, right? If I build a house this year and sell it next year, the house might still be profitable even if next year I'm building 3 more houses, so the company as a whole is still in the red on an annual basis. I mean, I'm not a financial expert but that doesn't…
The first part of the argument is just noticing that Dario is carefully avoiding making factual claims about Anthropic. Like, if the bank asked you if your construction company was profitable, would it be acceptable to respond: "Well, hypothetically, if a construction company sold houses for more than it cost to build them, that company could be considered profitable. It is possible to imagine a stylized model of a c…
Construction companies capitalize and depreciate over many years so they can answer "yes" they are profitable even when they are very cashflow negative. This is exactly Dario's point: model training costs are treated as expenses but in practice are much closer to construction costs. Model training effectively produces an asset, the model weights, which will generate revenue for many years into the future.
> Zitron argues that this isn't going to happen because training is actually something that companies need to do to retain customers at all.
This is exactly why Dario's point about each training run being profitable is so important. It suggest that this is not true. Customers are happy to use old models long enough to fully pay off their costs.
> there's a long history of companies using creative accounting
Zitron seems to know very little about accounting evidenced by him using terms like "gross margin" wrong in this article. He's pattern matching against his limited exposure to company financials to find superficial similarities between the AI labs and famous frauds. Find me a company that doesn't report non-GAAP measures. Google search claims 96% of SP 500 companies do it. Are they all frauds too? Sometimes non-GAAP adjustments are eye roll inducing but they are tolerated because they can be genuinely useful to get a fuller picture of the business.