Both companies are making bank on inference

waldopat 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You may not like this sources, but both the tomato throwers to the green visor crowds agree they are losing money. How and when they make up the difference is up to speculation

https://www.wheresyoured.at/why-everybody-is-losing-money-on... https://www.economist.com/business/2025/12/29/openai-faces-a... https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openais-own-forecast-predicts...

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exitb 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maybe on the API, but I highly doubt that the coding agent subscription plans are profitable at the moment.

	▲	tvink 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		For sure not

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ehsanu1 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Could you substantiate that? That take into account training and staffing costs?

	▲	ihsw 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The parent specifically said inference, which does not include training and staffing costs.

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lysace 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That is the big question. Got reliable data on that?

(My gut feeling tells me Claude Code is currently underpriced with regards to inference costs. But that's just a gut feeling...)

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tvink 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

https://www.wheresyoured.at/costs/

Their AWS spend being higher than their revenue might hint at the same.

Nobody has reliable data, I think it's fair to assume that even Anthropic is doing voodoo math to sleep at night.

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simianwords 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> If we subtract the cost of compute from revenue to calculate the gross margin (on an accounting basis),2 it seems to be about 50% — lower than the norm for software companies (where 60-80% is typical) but still higher than many industries.

https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/can-ai-companies-become-pr...

	▲	lysace 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The context of that quote is OpenAI as a whole.