> I wonder how much AI companies lost on this?

Probably zero, or even a profit. The idea that these companies are making a loss on subscriptions is an unsubstantiated HN fallacy.

On the contrary, they're probably making a small profit on subscriptions, or at least break even, and absolute bank on API pricing. Anthropic recently reported an 80% gross profit margin, for example.

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/anthropic-t...

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adrianvincent 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Profitable, if you just ignore how much money they spend

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janalsncm 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Excited for their IPO just to put this to bed, one way or another.

	▲	rich_sasha 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It might, but also might not. I would imagine the economics are genuinely very tangled up even before you start obfuscating it - it’s very hard to fairly allocate fixed costs between training and inference. I think a clearer picture would be from inference-only orgs.