alt Hacker NewsNo, in fact inference is far cheaper than most think, see analysis for serving Kimi K3.
If you mean OpenAI and Anthropic's investments into R&D, ok, perhaps.
However, they will not be able to increase prices unless what they are offering next is a significant enough improvement over the current SOTA, which might only be six months ahead of the Chinese models.
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It's amazing to see the shift from "Anthropic is profitable" to "it's just R&D costs" following the leak of Anthropic's finances. If there's one thing more abundant in this bubble than FOMO, it's special pleading.
These companies are burning helps of money, and they need to keep burning heaps of money in order to stay competitive. People have (correctly) learned to be extremely fickle consumers, they can't depend on making profit by running inference on a 1 year old model.
Not only is inference currently much cheaper than people seem to think, it is going to get much cheaper. NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin is going to drive costs down for current models considerably.