I don't see how this works, as the costs of running inference is so much higher than the revenues earned by the frontier labs. Anthropic and OpenAI don't continue to exist long-term in a world where GPT-5 and Claude 4.1 cost-quality models are SOTA.

▲

HDThoreaun 5 days ago | parent [-]

With gpt5 I’m not sure this is true. Certainly openAI is still losing money but if they stopped research and just focused on productionizing inference use cases I think they’d be profitable.

▲

criddell 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

But would they be profitable enough? They've taken on more than $50 billion of investment.

I think it's relatively easy for Meta to plow billions into AI. Last quarter their revenue was something like $15 billion. Open AI will be lucky to generate that over the next year.

	▲	HDThoreaun 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		meta net profit last quarter was over $18 billion so yea the big tech players definitely have a lot more runway

▲

epicureanideal 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> if they stopped research and just focused on productionizing inference use cases I think they’d be profitable

For a couple of years, until someone who did keep doing research pulled ahead a bit with a similarly good UI.