By investors. OpenAI and Anthropic are not profitable (Anthropic is profitable if you allow them to invent what profitability means).

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oblio 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I heard someone calling the key metric in Anthropic financial reports EBBT: Earnings Before Bad Things[1] :-)

[1] Where "Bad Things" would be the typical interest, taxes, depreciation, amortisation plus the Anthropic specific employee compensation, LLM training (you know, for the LLM lab), revenue sharing agreements (which is a form of paying for infrastructure), etc.

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staticman2 6 hours ago | parent [-]

A recent YouTube video by Patrick Boyle said the same thing. They are only profitable if you ignore all the costs that make them unprofitable such as paying employees and developing A models.

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ai-x 5 hours ago | parent [-]

That's not how gross margin works.

For LLMs, marginal cost is just electricity

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staticman2 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I made a statement about whether Anthropic was profitable I don't understand your reply.

Assuming you meant to reply to me and not someone else are you saying under GAAP accounting standards Anthropic is a profitable business because under GAAP accounting their only expense is electricity?

(I see what happened you skimmed the conversation and didn't follow what was being discussed.)

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rhdunn 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There's also things like training costs, spend on AI data centres and GPUs, R&D, sales and marketing, etc. See e.g. https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/anthropics-ipo-pros....

	▲	ai-x 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Those are not marginal cost or unit economics

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Bud 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Investment is not a subsidy. Words still have meanings. Nobody in this thread has successfully answered the question: subsidized by whom?

Non-punishment is also not a subsidy; again, words have meanings. Let's use the correct words.

	▲	rfrey 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Indirect subsidies are an accepted economic concept and well studied. The posts you replied to are obviously talking about indirect subsidies and dismissing them because they didn't say "indirect" everywhere is just sophism.
	▲	johnbellone 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		But some investments are subsidized (tax liabilities) among all the other things.