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Comment by jonas21

12 hours ago

Dario Amodei from Anthropic has made the claim that if you looked at each model as a separate business, it would be profitable [1], i.e. each model brings in more revenue over its lifetime than the total of training + inference costs. It's only because you're simultaneously training the next generation of models, which are larger and more expensive to train, but aren't generating revenue yet, that the company as a whole loses money in a given year.

Now, it's not like he opened up Anthropic's books for an audit, so you don't necessarily have to trust him. But you do need to believe that either (a) what he is saying is roughly true or (b) he is making the sort of fraudulent statements that could get you sent to prison.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcqQ1ebBqkc&t=1014s

He's speaking in a purely hypothetical sense. The title of the video even makes sure to note "in this example". If it turned this wasn't true of anthropic, it certainly wouldn't be fraud.