I don't buy it. A company like Anthropic is not going to just walk away from revenue. If external demand were really that high, then they should take the money first. And not just for the revenue; customer demand being that high is also an indication that the product is already great as-is so they stand to improve their bottom line by easing off on the R&D spend.

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ai-x 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

They are making a deliberate trade-off decision token use for their own vs token use for the rest of the world. while Google is making the opposite bet

In order to correctly make that decision, they must use the opportunity cost of selling that token. I'm pushing back at OPs claim that Anthropic must use internal cost to calculate that trade-off. They absolutely should use external selling price.

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MikhailTal an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> by easing off on the R&D spend

you could not be more wrong, you cannot IPO if you say product is good enough. The whole point, the bet why its worth trillions is because they will reach AGI and "singularity" first, so the gap vs open source will only increase. If you say product is great as is, then you will be caught up and game over

	▲	an hour ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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bluegatty 34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Anthropic has a ton of great things ahead of them.

They are doing the calculation on if the $150K/person is worth it, and it probably is.

Their revenues have exploded, they are unit-profitable, they need to also invest in the future.

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lnkdinsuxs an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> If external demand were really that high, then they should take the money first

AI infrastructure is supply constrained, so you have to make a decision: how much do I allocate to training vs inference?

Do I use it all for inference and do no further training? If so, what risks does that expose me to?

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AnthonyMouse 9 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> AI infrastructure is supply constrained

It's supply constrained in terms of global hardware production capacity, but that's not how it works for any given company. If Anthropic wanted more GPUs for customers paying them enough money to outbid the next guy in the market for the finite number of GPUs then they would do that and get a higher percentage of the finite number of GPUs.

So the cost of using more internally is still their own cost, i.e. the price of being the high bidder on more compute resources, not the retail price they charge to customers.

	▲	ai-x 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		No. Applying your own logic you got this wrong

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segfaultex an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s supply constrained for now, the moment companies like Anthropic have to switch to profit-making-mode, demand will dip as the prices skyrocket imo.

	▲	phkahler 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		>> the moment companies like Anthropic have to switch to profit-making-mode, demand will dip as the prices skyrocket imo. Yep. I bought a $20 per month Claude subscription last week. As I was using it last night I saw some tags in the log with prices at $36.xx and slowly rising. After asking and searching I got convinced that those are equivalent prices for API access at full price and Im not getting billed. As soon as $20 per month goes to $30+ per week I will change my behavior to lower it, up to canceling if it won't come down enough. Unfortunately I keep thinking of more uses for it. Fortunately I don't need to do any of them.

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an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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

Not if you’re desperately trying to stay ahead of AI frontier pack.

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jknoepfler an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

It's complete bologna. Basic GAAP accounting eliminates intra-company service consumption/sales. Looking at cloud compute, say, Amazon "bills" departments for AWS cloud compute consumption, but reporting internal cloud compute consumption as a thing they were doing assuming the rates charged to their least efficient customer would be beyond meaningless.