No models are subsidised -- there are lots of third party hosting services that will still run at breakeven/profit. (except Deepseek after discount)

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stymaar 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> No models are subsidised

We have no proof in either direction, it's not like we had access to their financial numbers in details.

And the pricing itself muddies the water, as input tokens that are already in the KV cache are practically free for the provider, whereas other tokens are expensive. So they could still make money overall thanks to people having multi-turn conversation (and as such, paying multiple times for the same token), but lose money on actual compute done.

> there are lots of third party hosting services that will still run at breakeven/profit.

How can you be sure that they are making profit directly from token price, and are not billing at marginal cost (i.e. electricity price, without counting the cost of the GPUs) and aiming to make a profit later on from the valuable training data that they are collecting in the process?

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jgalt212 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> as input tokens that are already in the KV cache are practically free for the provider,

not at today's RAM prices.

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simianwords 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> How can you be sure

You are free to believe that they are doing all this. Or you can simply believe the intuition that models are getting cheaper by the day. I can run Gemma 4 31B from my laptop today.

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stymaar 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Or you can simply believe the intuition

Sure, you can believe you intuition as much as you want, but telling strangers over the internet that they are wrong because “I trust my intuition” is… awkward.

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simianwords 2 hours ago | parent [-]

At some point it does come to intuition. Even if the companies IPO and share their financials, you can always argue that they might be lying.

	▲	stymaar 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Again, there's a difference between relying on intuition in your life (which we all do, lacking perfect information that would allow us to avoid relying on it), and telling someone they are wrong because your intuition says so.