Comment by onlyrealcuzzo
7 hours ago
It's rumored that Gemini 3.5 flash has a >50% margin, and I'd imagine 3.6 flash is even higher.
I do not think OpenAI or Anthropic are actively chasing margins - though, Anthropic is supposed to be profitable on some form of non-GAAP accounting...
I suspect Google isn't really interested in seeing how far it can get dragged into a race of selling dollars for $0.25, and is more interested to see if it can stay in the race selling $0.50 for a dollar - when everyone else is losing or barely breaking even.
It kind of doesn't make sense though, because typically a large org like Google can afford to crush competitors on pricing. They could probably even go toe to toe with chinese model pricing for years without feeling it.
Maybe they don't want to price war with the other labs so they can comfortably maintain healthy margins on selling them compute?
Maybe they are hoping that when the bottom drops out they will just be able to buy Anthropic or OpenAI for a few tens of billion.
Google already owns 14% of Anthropic.
google has to make money. flash is awesome. you can run it free on their infra and the performance and latency is excellent for what you wait and pay for right now, with great perf per watt. every person in the world going to google.com runs it. every query. its far larger than free gpt, localhost qween and what not.
it's their pro that isn't awesome at all. in fact, their pro kinda suck now that everyone else woke up.