There’s also examples where this didn’t work. Moviepass for example.

Taxis were an established profitable business model and the uber subsidisation wasn’t anywhere near as much as AI subsidies.

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0x457 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Moviepass failed because they thought it's going to be like Gym membership - people buy and don't go, but guess what? People love going to movie theaters. On its own its not bad, see AMC Stubs, but AMC owns the theater, they sell you popcorn and soda. OpenAI an Anthropic is closer to AMC than Moviepass.

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isubkhankulov 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Disagree with your second paragraph. Uber/lyft subsidized into deep negative margin territory around ~2015 or so. Anthropic (and OpenAI) are subsidizing but not losing money on these consumer plans.

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edg5000 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> subsidizing but not losing money

????

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HWR_14 2 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The claim is that uber and lyft lost money on each ride but that openai and anthropic make money on inference. Just not enough to pay the cost of developing the models. The difference is that uber and lyft had to change their pricing (or payment) models to make money, where anthropic or openai could just sell enough inference (at some level of sales).

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Gigachad 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's profitable if you don't count the expenses.

	▲	oblio an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I think you're joking but that's Amodei & co are claiming with a straight face.