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.

▲

staticman2 7 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.

▲

ai-x 7 hours ago | parent [-]

That's not how gross margin works.

For LLMs, marginal cost is just electricity

▲

staticman2 6 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.)

▲

rhdunn 4 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 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Those are not marginal cost or unit economics