Also, if I understand correctly, they are rumored to have a profitable EBITDA.

It's a funny metric considering Depreciation is a huge cost for them.

"We are profitable when we don't count our expenses"

There's a good reason to look at it separately: if inference is profitable then they make money (or at least lose less money) when they get more customers, because any fixed costs are spread across more usage.

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surgical_fire an hour ago | parent [-]

Depreciation is part of the cost of inference. Inference happens in GPUs that have a relatively short lifespan.

Those GPUs are very expensive.

Inference is expensive because a GPU can only process a certain amount of requests in a given timeframe. Remember that Anthropic is constrained in compute.

If they are constrained, it means that those GPUs are not idle. If they have more customers, they will need more GPUs.

If they have to play silly games using EBITDA to be "profitable", then it means that they need to ramp up prices a lot more than they already did.

Which is why in these discussions I always say that inference is also extremely expensive. Too many people like to pretend without any evidence that inference is cheap.

	▲	skybrian 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Anthropic and OpenAI don't own data centers. Since they're renting GPU's, that's not depreciation. Paying rent is an operating cost. Language models don't wear out the same way; upgrading is a choice.