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Comment by sebzim4500

10 hours ago

It sounds plausible they spent more, given the output tokens (6 billion of them) would cost $300k at API prices and presumably there will have been many more input tokens than output tokens.

24 comments

sebzim4500

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_aavaa_  9 hours ago

Unlikely, api pricing includes a healthy profit margin (as near as we can tell from the outside) which they wouldn’t charge themselves.

  • mbesto  8 hours ago

    > healthy profit margin (as near as we can tell from the outside)

    Ugh we still don't know if this is true and it's nearly impossible to calculate without a full understanding of the real CAPEX cycle. Stop spreading these rumors until we know for sure.

    • bryanlarsen  8 hours ago

      SemiAnalysis estimates their profit margin to be 70%. To be losing money on inference implies that their costs are almost 4X higher than SemiAnalysis has calculated. That's not credible.

      2 replies →

  • musictubes  1 hour ago

    And which they could not charge anyone for. Unless these were extra resources that would otherwise go unused it cost them the amount they could have charged for them. Normally I would expect most businesses to make reasonable tradeoffs when it comes to how to allocate resources. I’m not convinced that any of the AI providers should be given that benefit of the doubt.

  • 2muchcoffeeman  7 hours ago

    The token price seems like a poor measure.

    Building the LLM that could do this work in 11 days cost multi billions.

    The economics probably only make sense if LLMs prove to be a benefit to almost everyone in a way we can all accept.

    Otherwise this cost a lot more than we’d otherwise pay. It was incredibly fast though. But we all know: cost, speed, quality. Pick two.

  • alch-  9 hours ago

    I don't think Anthropic is turning a profit ;)

    • _aavaa_  9 hours ago

      Whether on net they turn a profit as company overall is neither here nor there.. My point is that they are selling API tokens at a profit (or if being pedantic, then at a price higher than the cost to serve them ignoring research costs). And that that price is got a healthy margin which they don't charge themselves.