> Nothing is subsidized. Subscriptions are profitable for both Anthropic and OpenAI.

Even if subscriptions are locally profitable (i. e., the cost of the subscription covers the cost of inference), they're still subsidized because they don't cover training and running the company; otherwise, these companies would be profitable.

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gck1 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I can see that being true, and it very likely is true. But isn't infinite VC money and no incentives to optimize operations the reason behind that?

Take a look at China for example - they have no access to NVIDIA, so they're trying to build their own hardware, they have no unlimited funding, so they try to optimize things.

And Anthropic is complete opposite of that - if NVIDIA were to triple their prices tomorrow, Anthropic would still pay them.

In the end, either we all somehow go mad and start paying Anthropic tens of thousands of dollars per month so support this madness, or we will go with whoever isn't lighting cash on fire.

	▲	re-thc 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Take a look at China for example - they have no access to NVIDIA Not true. Stop following US media spam if needed. 1. Very recently, the US did close a loophole on sanctions that allowed Chinese companies to use NVIDIA hardware outside of China i.e. before that was closed they all had access. The trick was train outside, do adjustments, ship the disks back and use non-NVIDIA in China, but at least the training and endpoints not hosted in China could all use NVIDIA. 2. There's been plenty of reports including fines and bans e.g. to Supermicro on smuggling NVIDIA hardware to China. I doubt it has been stopped. You can't catch everyone.