> the big providers are charging full freight for inference.

Except they're not. Anthropic's claims of temporary profitability line up exactly with when SpaceX is giving them discounted compute, OpenAI's such a shitfest they threw the CFO off the glass cliff for daring to push back against the IPO. "Profitable on inference" is an unsubstantiated rumour.

Just look at the copilot changes. Demand switching to other providers immediately when prices rise, and there's not even certainty that the new copilot prices cover costs.

> They might not make back the money from training

This is an understatement. With all the datacenter buildout, they need trillions. For the investors get their money back and the bubble to not implode, they functionally need to unemploy everyone in the US.

If the AI dream is real, society just breaks.

▲

icepush 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Unemploying everyone was what openai described as their success condition when it was founded a decade ago. There was a q&a on their website that said "How will you know when you have reached AGI? When the system performs most or all economically valuable work." Lots of people thought they were joking, or it was marketing, but they were 100% serious from the first.

▲

simonw 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> "Profitable on inference" is an unsubstantiated rumour.

So is "unprofitable on inference".

Thankfully we should find out for real as soon as those S-1 documents arrive.

▲

treis 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The pricing on Open router is clear. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all garner a massive premium over deepseek and qwen. There's no other realistic explanation except that they're making bank.

▲

bootsmann 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I can sell the tomatoes in my garden for twice the price of those in the supermarket and still make massive loses.

▲

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

> There's no other realistic explanation except that they're making bank.

If they were, they'd never shut up about it. Yet they keep quiet about the financials.

	▲	treis 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They don't shut up about it. Profitable on inference has been the story for years.

▲

johnsmith1840 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why do you think Chinese companies can do that? It's government subsidising price they do it with literally every ibdustry.

Home grow a bunch discount them federally, let them wipe the foreign markets.

If AI is threatened by china why would US NOT do the same? If they did they're in a much stronger position to do so than china. Cheaper energy, more cash, stronger industries.

Infrastrucure is thr kind of thing that only a foolish US admin would let fall apart to their advesary.

	▲	treis 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's not all Chinese companies. It's some western companies running Chinese models.

▲

boarsofcanada 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And yet they are not profitable on an ongoing basis, and aren’t even claiming to be.

The supply is currently constrained because 50+% of data center plans were cancelled as a result of the impossibility of the buildouts happening in a timely fashion, and subscriptions are charging a small fraction of the actual cost of inference, leading them to all bleed money, hence the rush to IPO to get one last infusion, since many of the past investors have publicly stated they aren’t putting any more money in until they see an ROI.

▲

treis 3 hours ago | parent [-]

They've stopped subscriptions for the most part. Companies are paying API rates for their employees.

	▲	boarsofcanada 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Companies are hitting their budgeted limits for AI tokens less than half way through the year and reporting that they aren’t seeing enough benefit to substantially increase that budget, and so they are scaling back use and asking people to be prudent rather than token maxxing. In the meantime subscriptions still exist in the form of chatbots and it’s easy to exceed the inference cost of the provider by simply using your daily, weekly, and monthly limits. The reality is that we just don’t seem to be at a point now where people are willing to pay full price for the perceived value. Perhaps we’ll get there within another generation or two of hardware and software improvements.

▲

WarmWash 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>For the investors get their money back and the bubble to not implode, they functionally need to unemploy everyone in the US.

More like $75/mo per user for the next 5-10 years if they can get 5% of the global population to pay that.