| ▲ | simonw 4 hours ago | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
If that was genuinely happening here - Anthropic were selling inference for less than the power and data center costs needed to serve those tokens - it would indeed be a very bad sign for their health. I don't think they're doing that. Estimates I've seen have their inference margin at ~60% - there's one from Morgan Stanley in this article, for example: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-anthropic-billions-cl... | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | 1shooner 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
>The bank's analysts then assumed Anthropic gross profit margins of 60%, and estimated that 75% of related costs are spent on AWS cloud services. Not estimate, assumption. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | viscanti 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
They had pretty drastic price cuts on Opus 4.5. It's possible they're now selling inference at a loss to gain market share, or at least that their margins are much lower. Dario claims that all their previous models were profitable (even after accounting for research costs), but it's unclear that there's a path to keeping their previous margins and expanding revenue as fast or faster than their costs (each model has been substantially more expensive than the previous model). | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | verdverm 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I've been wondering about this generally... Are the per-request API prices I'm paying at a profit or a loss? My billing would suggest they are not making a profit on the monthly fees (unless there are a bunch of enterprise accounts in group deals not being used, I am one of those I think) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | bpavuk 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
but those AI/ML researchers aka LLM optimization staff are not cheap. their salaries have skyrocketed, and some are being fought for like top-tier soccer stars and actors/actresses | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | hollerith 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The leaders of Anthropic, OpenAI and DeepMind all hope to create models that are much more powerful than the ones they have now. A large portion of the many tens of billions of dollars they have at their disposal (OpenAI alone raised 40 billion in April) is probably going toward this ambition—basically a huge science experiment. For example, when an AI lab offers an individual researcher a $250 million pay package, it can only be because they hope that the researcher can help them with something very ambitious: there's no need to pay that much for a single employee to help them reduce the costs of serving the paying customers they have now. The point is that you can be right that Anthropic is making money on the marginal new user of Claude, but Anthropic's investors might still get soaked if the huge science experiment does not bear fruit. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||