What AI lab is profitable?

And in before ‘JumpCrissCross chimes in about inference being profitable while ignoring all the investment costs needed to get inference to where it is.

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cosmicgadget 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Profitability is an awfully narrow metric.

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zrobotics 6 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

>> Profitability is an awfully narrow metric.

I mean, if anything summarizes where we have gotten to as an industry this quote is sure it. From Uber using VC funds to subsidize growth to where the AI players are at...

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gradus_ad an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

It's a powerful metric. It captures to what extent something is sustainably possible today.

	▲	fn-mote 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The full balance sheet captures the info. If the AI companies suck up all of our salaries and spend that money on R&D/training, they still aren’t profitable, right?

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redwood 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Anthropic as of a few months ago.

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gamblor956 2 hours ago | parent [-]

That explains the 80 Billion loss on their IPO disclosures.

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cscheid 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I mean, it literally does. Something like 70+ billion of those 80 billion are accounting adjustments because their debt is supposed to be handled in stock and their stock price skyrocketed.

	▲	gamblor956 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		While I was being facetious, Anthropic is nowhere close to being profitable in the normal, i.e., GAAP meaning of the term. It's only using unicorn fantasy lalaland financials that they are "profitable." Before someone else jumps in talking about "unit economics": unit economics only matters if you can sell the units long enough to make the initial (capitalized) investment (i.e., R&D) back. Models aren't commercially viable long enough for the unit economics to work.

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adventured an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Why have they needed to worry about profitability?

They have been chasing extreme growth with cheap money. That enabled them to hyper scale at a pace the world has rarely seen before. They have made the correct choice so far.

The absolute dumbest thing they could have done up to this point is slow down to try to turn a profit. They have not needed to. Market capture is the sole thing they should be focused on. Here's a hint: how many users does GPT have now versus three years ago?

There appears to be very widespread confusion about what purpose turning a profit serves and how business operations actually work.

Go back in time and tell Uber in ~2013-2015 that it needs to immediately become profitable and not focus on capturing the market.

	▲	leptons 29 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Market capture didn't work so well for Uber, and it won't work for AI, and even less so for AI because you can't get a driver in China to take you to LAX airport, but you can use cheaper Chinese AI. Uber has to pay back all the billions of dollars it wasted trying to get people to use their platform, and now I can't afford most Uber or Lyft rides, it's way too expensive. So did market capture really work if they had to raise their prices so much as to make the service unworkable for most people? The only time I take uber is if my company pays for it, and that is getting less often. AI is also going to have to become way too expensive so they can pay back the billions (trillions?) it is borrowing. And, when everyone is laid-off or fired because AI took their job, then who's going to be paying for AI? I guess the companies that lay off all the humans will, but when the wealthy business owners realize they've replaced everything with AI and nobody is buying what they are selling because there's no more jobs, then what? Sounds like they should worry about profitability, and a lot of other things too.