Comment by JacobAsmuth

I'm mildly optimistic about Anthropic: positive free cash flow, growing margins, and incredible revenue growth are heartening. Its clear now that their delayed IPO was due to continually improving financial metrics and the desire to balance the time value of an earlier IPO with the gains from presenting a financially healthier company which is growing quickly and spending heavily to do so.

OpenAI seems to be in a much tougher spot and I'm not sure how they'll fare in the future.

But honestly, neither of those really matter to me and its why I didn't mention them in my above comment. Anthropic + OpenAI revenue is ~$120B/yr, and even if those companies go to zero because open models commoditize their business model, that demand for inference isn't going to go away, someone will need to absorb it. In fact I would expect that an open model good enough to drive demand for Opus 5.5 all the way down to zero would be so good that inference on that model would drastically exceed what we're seeing. I'm more concerned with one layer up, the datacenter builders and the semiconductor companies, and there I see fortress balance sheets, great governance, and massive demand. Open Models are great for these companies, not a threat at all. I don't see any credible threat to AWS+Azure+GCP datacenter buildout not paying for itself.