[eldenring]

Its not subsidized, in fact, they probably have very healthy margins on Claude Code.

[elzbardico]

Yeah. If you ignore the negligible fact that some investor may want a return on all that money that is going into capex I am pretty sure you can, Enron style, get to the conclusion that any of those companies have “healthy” margins.

[phi-go]

Why do you think that?

[johndough]

DeepSeek had a theoretical profit margin of 545 % [1] with much inferior GPUs at 1/60th the API price.

Anthropic's Opus 4.6 is a bit bigger, but they'd have to be insanely incompetent to not make a profit on inference.

[1] https://github.com/deepseek-ai/open-infra-index/blob/main/20...

[computerex]

American labs trained in a different way than the Chinese labs. They might be making profit on inference but they are burning money otherwise.

[DANmode]

> they'd have to be insanely incompetent to not make a profit on inference.

Are you aware of how many years Amazon didn’t turn a profit?

Not agreeing with the tactic - just…are you aware of it?

[arexxbifs]

Amazon was founded in 1994, went public in 1997 and became profitable in 2001. So Anthropic is two years behind with the IPO but who knows, maybe they'll be profitable by 2028? OpenAI is even more behind schedule.

[poisonborz]

How much loss did they accumulate until 2001? Pretty sure it wasn't the 44 billion OpenAI has. And Amazon didn't have many direct competitors offering the same services.

[johndough]

Did Amazon really not turn a profit, or apply a bunch of tricks to make it appear like they didn't in order to avoid taxes? Given their history, I'd assume the later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_tax_avoidance

Anyway, this has nothing to do with whether inference is profitable.

[DANmode]

It has everything to do with whether they make profit on paper,

vs give away the farm via free tier accounts, free trials,

and last but not least: subsidized compute to hook entire organizations………

[elzbardico]

Deepseek lies about costs systematically. This is just another fantasy.

[johndough]

What do you base your accusations on? Is there a specific number from the link above that you claim is a lie?

And how are 7 other providers able to offer DeepSeek API access at roughly the same price as DeepSeek?

https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v3.2

[elzbardico]

Their price is not a signal of their costs, it is the result of competitive pressure. This shouldn't be so hard to understand. Companies have burned investor money for market share for quite some time in our world.

This is the expected, the normal, why are you so defensive?

[johndough]

> why are you so defensive?

Because you made stuff up, did not show any proof, and ignored my proof to the contrary.

You made the claim:

    > Deepseek lies about costs systematically.

DeepSeek broke down their cost in great detail, yet you simply called it "lies", but did not even mention which specific number of theirs you claim is a lie, so your statement is difficult to falsify. You also ignored my request for clarification.

[noosphr]

Because if you don't then current valuations are a bublle propped inflated by burning a mountain of cash.

[falcor84]

That's not how valuations work. A company's valuation is typically based on an NPV (net present value) calculation, which is a power series of its time-discounted future cash flows. Depending on the company's strategy, it's often rational for it to not be profitable for quite a long while, as long as it can give investors the expectation of significant profitability down the line.

Having said that, I do think that there is an investment bubble in AI, but am just arguing that you're not looking at the right signal.

[cies]

And that's OpenAI's biz model? :)