alt Hacker NewsIt's quite clear that these companies do make money on each marginal token. They've said this directly and analysts agree [1]. It's less clear that the margins are high enough to pay off the up-front cost of training each model.
[1] https://epochai.substack.com/p/can-ai-companies-become-profi...
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> They've said this directly and analysts agree [1]
chasing down a few sources in that article leads to articles like this at the root of claims[1], which is entirely based on information "according to a person with knowledge of the company’s financials", which doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.
[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-getting-effic...
It's also true that their inference costs are being heavily subsidized. For example, if you calculate Oracles debt into OpenAIs revenue, they would be incredibly far underwater on inference.
Sue, but if they stop training new models, the current models will be useless in a few years as our knowledge base evolves. They need to continually train new models to have a useful product.
It’s not clear at all because model training upfront costs and how you depreciate them are big unknowns, even for deprecated models. See my last comment for a bit more detail.