they are profitable on tokens. if company itself is profitable is unknown and we will see it soon.
Anthropic/OpenAI may be spending more than $1000 for every $100 you pay them
71–80 of 89 posts
Re: Anthropic/OpenAI may be spending more than $1000 for every $100 you pay them
#72Is he headline strictly about subsidized subscriptions? Anthropic announced their first profitable quarter.
> Anthropic announced their first profitable quarter
Free: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/anthropic-revenue-explosive-...
Paywall: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mind-blowing-growth-is-about-to-...
Actual article:
> Mind-Blowing Growth Is About to Propel Anthropic Into Its First Profitable Quarter
Condition:
> The startup expects a 130% revenue surge to $10.9 billion in the June quarter and its first operating profit, defying skeptics of the AI boom
Ah yes, if revenue grows by 130% and expenses don't they might make a profit of $500M on $11B revenue.
I wish people actually bothered to at least read the titles.
Re: Anthropic/OpenAI may be spending more than $1000 for every $100 you pay them
#73Anthropic and openai has the most efficient tokens per unit of compute on the planet and honestly that's their current moat. They're able to serve tokens at half the cost of any opensource provider. Here's the costs to serve opus 4.7 in china on aws according to one of my connections that operates an enterprise account in the region: Input: $0.257 Output: $1.286 Cache read: $0.0257 Cache write: $0.322 And I have zero…
My understanding is there's local API resellers who provide gateway access to bundle claude/openai with other cheaper PRC models via routing to water down price. The resellers are bulk generating pro accounts / trials i.e. basically 100% subsidized by Anthropic/OpenAI. Resellers also sell for cost or below cost because they're intercepting training data to resell. The economics of PRC token is divorced from Anthropic…
Not the same thing, these are actually gateways into opus models hosted on hardware at AWS in china. https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/about-aws/china/
Also abuse of free accounts/trials wouldn't work since it would destroy cache and it maintains 97% cache rate.
Re: Anthropic/OpenAI may be spending more than $1000 for every $100 you pay them
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Teachers in public schools are being told to use AI in their curriculum. In some cases, this means students are being taught not to think (regardless of the intent of the lesson). When prices make this curriculum untenable but the kids already depend on it, that rugpull is going to severely harm a generation of kids whose education was already disturbed in 2020.
Good lord! Where is this happening? Why would anybody think this was a good idea?
Concretely, I know it's happening in the Vancouver BC school district, and thankfully many students are protesting. Probably many more places.
Re: Anthropic/OpenAI may be spending more than $1000 for every $100 you pay them
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
The assumptions are so much worse than that: > Methodology & assumptions: No caching This is absolutely absurd. Claude code is of course using the cache (and this can be verified by looking at the traffic). It would be an incredibly stupid design to resend the whole input without a cache for every input, every tool use, etc..
The no-caching is explained in the linked conversation. The numbers are from actual use.
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Re: Anthropic/OpenAI may be spending more than $1000 for every $100 you pay them
#76That’s probably because only a handful of companies manufacture GPUs, and they’re still expensive. I think that will change over time as competition increases. LLMs are also still in a relatively early stage. We’re already seeing models become both smaller and more capable—for example, GPT-4 compared to Qwen3-30B, which can outperform GPT-4 in many tasks while using significantly less compute. So if this trend contin…
That may change over time, but it's not going to change anytime soon. All the fabs are sold out and companies like Nvidia and AMD are buying up all their capacity until at least 2028, and new fabs aren't going to be coming online in a short time. So, no, there won't be a lot more competition until at earliest 2032.
Re: Anthropic/OpenAI may be spending more than $1000 for every $100 you pay them
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you share some use cases of what you think will get companies to become hooked? I'm really failing to see a dependency link emerging either now or in the future. That combined with the relatively easy switching costs. It doesn't bode well for AI companies seeking to create a walled garden.
Teachers in public schools are being told to use AI in their curriculum. In some cases, this means students are being taught not to think (regardless of the intent of the lesson). When prices make this curriculum untenable but the kids already depend on it, that rugpull is going to severely harm a generation of kids whose education was already disturbed in 2020.
I would expect standardized testing to be the wall that prevents this from going far.
Re: Anthropic/OpenAI may be spending more than $1000 for every $100 you pay them
#78If this is the true cost of AI then the future might be dedicated extension cards for computers that hardcode entire models + weights. Downside: you need to buy a new one for each model. Upside: insanely fast inference and zero subscription cost, only one time purchase cost. Once a certain open source model gets good enough this might become viable. Right now the landscape is still shifting too fast. State of the art…
This seems rather optimistic. Tons of subscriptions people pay for would be cheaper/better locally, but they want turnkey and to set it then forget it.
The name of the game with businesses right now is also subscriptions. Hell look at Microsoft. The incentives are not there to let you pay a one time cost for some hardware.
Re: Anthropic/OpenAI may be spending more than $1000 for every $100 you pay them
#79As usual, there’s no factual basis for the claims other than “I made it up” and author doesn’t seem to have technical experience with ML experience. A lot of weasel words doing all the heavy lifting here.
I'm sorry, were you speaking about this topic post or about posts authored by Sam/Amodei and the like?
Re: Anthropic/OpenAI may be spending more than $1000 for every $100 you pay them
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to mention the rise of Chinese chips. GPUs that can run everything from Crysis to CUDA are a harder engineering problem to solve than creating a chip that's optimized for inference. Not to mention that inference is an excellent first step towards a full, competitive GPU as well.
Which chips are these? It seems the main challenge is data bus speed and memory capacity now and it seems no one can really compete with NVIDIA now? And i doubt NVIDIA is still optimizing for anything expect LLMs/AI, their last keynote had less than two minutes of gaming related content and they even canceled their new generation of gaming cards for now. And it seems all of these advanced chips rely on the most advan…
I'm not nearly as knowledgeable about chips as I would like to be but I'm seeing lots of hype around the new Huawei Ascend 910C-Chips. These are in no way competitive with Nvidia for training but they're cheap for inference and seems to be winning market share inside China.
China doesn't access to any of the latest chips technology but Huawei seems to have a roadmap to work around this by focussing on "3D chips" (vertical stacked). It's unclear if they can pull this off but if they can it might be a huge boost and allow them to further drive down inference prices.