Comment by DANmode
12 days ago
> they'd have to be insanely incompetent to not make a profit on inference.
Are you aware of how many years Amazon didn’t turn a profit?
Not agreeing with the tactic - just…are you aware of it?
12 days ago
> they'd have to be insanely incompetent to not make a profit on inference.
Are you aware of how many years Amazon didn’t turn a profit?
Not agreeing with the tactic - just…are you aware of it?
Amazon was founded in 1994, went public in 1997 and became profitable in 2001. So Anthropic is two years behind with the IPO but who knows, maybe they'll be profitable by 2028? OpenAI is even more behind schedule.
How much loss did they accumulate until 2001? Pretty sure it wasn't the 44 billion OpenAI has. And Amazon didn't have many direct competitors offering the same services.
Did Amazon really not turn a profit, or apply a bunch of tricks to make it appear like they didn't in order to avoid taxes? Given their history, I'd assume the later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_tax_avoidance
Anyway, this has nothing to do with whether inference is profitable.
It has everything to do with whether they make profit on paper,
vs give away the farm via free tier accounts, free trials,
and last but not least: subsidized compute to hook entire organizations………