Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can ask an AI what it costs to produce an Opus token. The answer I got was $0.216/M Token. That takes into account hardware cost, power, cooling and hosting. Others have posted links here saying inference is about 30% of Anthropic's spend, the other 70% is R&D - things like developing the next model. If you take that into account, add a profit margin, and round to make the figures easy you end up with them sellin…
That's helpful, thanks! Once past IPO, I suspect the 70% -> R&D must shrink, right? I mean, to keep the stock afloat long term P/E must come down right? Public investors strike me as less willing to pour money into R&D, which is why I'm wondering about the timing of IPO in my initial question.
I dunno. Yes, the stock market dictates they get a return. But the return they get on that R&D isn't easy to determine. The return is high now. When you go from the previous best model only being able to find a handful of security issues, to the next model producing a flood so large Linus is screaming rage into the void complaining that his legion of helpers can't handle the flood of new CVEs (but he can't really blame anyone for this), development is going very fast. They haven't monetised the ability yet, but really does critical infrastructure have any choice now other than to get their entire codebase vetted by Mythos? How much is that monopoly worth? (Granted - it won't last long.)
Their R&D is aimed at discovering - well I'm not sure what you would call it, but it's the same thing that allows a mother to take a glance at her child and know what's troubling them, or a senior engineer to glance at code and spot a bug, or a same thing that a chess master to look at a chess board to produce a move in a second or so that defeats all but the best chess players. There are lots of these areas of expertise to be discovered. They are worth a lot of money. When does it stop?
A hyped exploration of this by bloomberge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmFKaqJg5X4