> nothing about the industry's finances add up right now

Nothing about the industry’s finances, or about Anthropic and OpenAI’s finances?

I look at the list of providers on OpenRouter for open models, and I don’t believe all of them are losing money. FWIW Anthropic claims (iirc) that they don’t lose money on inference. So I don’t think the industry or the model of selling inference is what’s in trouble there.

I am much more skeptical of Anthropic and OpenAI’s business model of spending gigantic sums on generating proprietary models. Latest Claude and GPT are very very good, but not better enough than the competition to justify the cash spend. It feels unlikely that anyone is gonna “winner takes all” the market at this point. I don’t see how Anthropic or OpenAI’s business model survive as independent entities, or how current owners don’t take a gigantic haircut, other than by Sam Altman managing to do something insane like reverse acquiring Oracle.

EDIT: also feels like Musk has shown how shallow the moat is. With enough cash and access to exceptional engineers, you can magic a frontier model out of the ether, however much of a douche you are.