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Comment by an0malous

5 hours ago

> From the limited perspective of software development, today’s models are well-worth their per-token cost.

At the current price or real price? Anthropic said a $200 subscription can cost them $5000 so the real price could be anywhere from 10-30x the current price.

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an0malous

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RealityVoid  5 hours ago

No, that is probably one of the worst cases they probably saw. Most likely the subscription inference cost is much lower than you expect. If you look at costs for similar open models they are much lower than what you get by buying from anthropic, so that is the real cost basis I expect.

It's likely Amazon is making a fucking killing though.

  • SlinkyOnStairs  4 hours ago

    While $5000 is a lot, the people who rack up close or just over a thousand "API equivalent cost" are pretty common.

    > Most likely the subscription inference cost is much lower than you expect.

    This is probably not true because they'd be screaming it off every rooftop were that the case.

    Same deal with the API inference. Even the "profitable on inference" claim is sourced back to hearsay of informal statements made by OpenAI/Anthropic staff. No formal announcements, nothing remotely of the "You can trust what I'm saying, because if I'm lying the SEC will have my head" sort.

    Yet making such statements would be invaluable. If Anthropic can demonstrate profitability before OpenAI, they could poach most of the funding. There's no reason to keep it a company secret.

    And API inference is only part of the total costs, not even bringing in training and ongoing fine-tuning. If they're not even profitable on inference, how could they hope to be profitable overall.

    • RealityVoid  2 hours ago

      > While $5000 is a lot, the people who rack up close or just over a thousand "API equivalent cost" are pretty common.

      I think if you're not Anthropic and you don't have access to the actual data, then you can't say for sure. A bunch of anecdotes on terminally-AI people on twitter is not making a convincing case for me, IMO.

      On the other hand, if similarly sized models cost much much cheaper than this, why, in the world, would Anthropic have much higher costs than that?

      Also, counterpoint, maybe they want you to think that they have higher costs so you're more willing to actually pay for it?

  • PunchyHamster  4 hours ago

    The "worst case" is probably someone just using their $200 account limits. So yeah, real cost is probably close to that