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Comment by fnord77 | Hacker News Reader

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fnord77·

> I'm fairly confident the Forbes sources are confusing retail API prices with actual compute costs

Aren't they losing money on the retail API pricing, too?

> ... comparisons to artificially low priced Chinese providers...

Yeah, no this article does not pass the sniff test.

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> Aren't they losing money on the retail API pricing, too?

No, they aren't, and probably neither is anyone else offering API pricing. And Anthropic's API margins may be higher than anyone else.

For example, DeepSeek released numbers showing that R1 was served at approximately "a cost profit margin of 545%" (meaning 82% of revenue is profit), see my comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46663852

Weird that they're all looking for outside money then

They're all looking for outside money because they're all looking for outside money, and so need to keep up with their competitors investments in training. It's a game of chicken. Once their ability to raise more abates, they'll slow down new training runs, and fund that out of inference margins instead, but the first one to be forced to do so will risk losing market share.

Inference is profitable. No one is selling at a loss. It’s training to keep up with competitors that is causing losses.

> Inference is profitable

Eh. We don't really know that, and the people saying that have an interest in the rest of the world believing it's true.

How are we so sure that deep inside the moon isn't made out of cheese?

I remember Enron. Hell, I remember the S&Ls. I've seen this movie too many times to not know how it ends.

I remember Google, Meta, Apple, Eli Lily, and other meteoric risen companies.

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