Comment by WarmWash

2 hours ago

If you need to strawman to make a point, you're probably not making a good point.

"We're profitable on inference. If we didn't pay for training, we'd be a very profitable company." - https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/17/sam-altman/

Where exactly is my strawman? Scam Altman himself has said this, if we ignore the inconvenient parts of the business that loses all that money, they'd be super-duper profitable.

Anthropic said something similar, claiming to their investors they're profitable... If you ignore partner costs and the costs of training.

And mind you this is coming from a proven pathological liar who has a massive vested interest in over exaggerating his business' viability, so doubtless the "Very profitable" part is itself a massive lie.

  • Gross profitability always happens before net profitability, lol. "We've reached the first but not the second" isn't a deceptive claim, especially with the caveat in the same sentence, and it's a step that every net profitable company went through at some point in its life.

  • The correct quote is "If you ignore the costs that will come down in the future or stay fixed as userbase scales, then we are actually quite profitable"

    Which is a basic truism of pretty much all startups, and nothing noteworthy or insightful to point out.