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Comment by impulser_

4 days ago

It shouldn't be surprising OpenAI does have the most compute out of all the major labs. The only reason why Anthropic models are expensive is they are the most in demand models in the world and Anthropic is fighting for compute. The only way to you limit demand for your model is increasing API pricing this is also why Anthropic probably has great margin and probably is profitable compared to OpenAI.

I also suspect there is a price fixing agreement between all of the inference providers for Claude (such as Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft, etc).

  • I doubt there's any sort of criminal behavior there - the model is anthropic's up and anthropic probably charges a very expensive license fee that's the same for all of them, and their cogs on compute aren't going to be wildly different, so the main drivers of the cost are roughly the same and they're all offering customers the same end product so the prices would likely also be similar in the end

    • Do you really think there is nothing someone could do to make it a fraction of a percentage cheaper to serve like having access to cheaper electricity or a more mature cloud management software. Even saving a fraction of a penny on the prices can make a different due to how much volume people are paying for.

  • "Price fixing" isn't the correct term here but yes, it's very common to have the same price across different retailers/resellers.

    • There is a difference between the market discovering a price and a bunch of retailers/resellers entering an agreement to sell at a specific price.