[atwrk]

But are they actually profitable, or do they employ creative accounting where only parts of overhead expenses are counted against all of inference revenue, similar to what Uber did?

OpenAI's numbers show that they definitely are not profitable on inference, and even worse, revenue growth scaled linearly with inference cost from 2024 to 2025, which means they can't outgrow this problem. See https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/

[therealdrag0]

Does it matter if it’s creative accounting? Uber is a great example of a company that everyone was certain would fail because it was unprofitable and now it succeeded and is profitable.

[armonster]

Uber didn't have ever-increasing costs though.

[baq]

If they shut down all training today they’d be absolutely printing money for the next couple quarters and then die with a bang once the other lab releases the next frontier to the public.

[mattmanser]

Try doing some inference with local models.

I'd be surprised if they're making money on inference just from that. There's no way someone paying $20 p/m and using it all day is not spending way more on even just the electricity for tokens, let alone the capex.

[beepbooptheory]

I don't really get the last bit. It's hard to imagine what a new fangled "frontier model" could do that would blow anyone out of the water. Like what does this look like? Really good benchmarks? Who cares about that anymore?

[layer8]

Not hallucinating anymore would be a good start.

[shimman]

How? They're already burning $2 bills to make $1, court documents shown that Anthropic has already been lying around revenue (claimed to have made $19 billion when it's actually $5 billion to date [1]).

Not hard to believe they're lying about other things when they've been lying about the capability of their products since inception.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/commentary/breakingviews/anthropic-g...

[thereitgoes456]

That is not what the article says, it says $19B ARR.

I don’t necessarily see a contradiction. $19B run rate, achieved very recently, is actually consistent with $5B lifetime earnings, because their growth curve is so sharp. Zitron is not good at math.

[shimman]

Didn't link to Zitron site but if you can't see how dishonest it is to say you have $19b ARR when the reality is you have only a total of $5b IDK what to tell you. Says more about how you think and why you think it's okay for corporations to be misleading.

[s1artibartfast]

Seems natural to me too. ARR is understood as the current rate. It would be more misleading to say 5b ARR.

Its like asking how fast a car is moving.

[MattRix]

This is not lying, that is just what run rate revenue means! It makes sense to use as a metric when a company’s user base is growing as fast as Anthropic’s is.

[shimman]

It makes sense to be extremely misleading about actual accounting figures? In what world is it okay to say you have $19b in ARR when you have only ever generated $5b for the entire duration of your company's existence?

Did Enron start a business school I'm unaware of something?

[dragonwriter]

> In what world is it okay to say you have $19b in ARR when you have only ever generated $5b for the entire duration of your company's existence?

In the same world that it makes sense to say that your current speed is 57mph when you've only driven 15 miles since starting the trip.

[MattRix]

hah that’s a great way to explain it

[baq]

sir if you say a number is $19B and everyone who is invested knows what it means, is there a problem?

[B56b]

So just ignoring the link entirely, cool cool cool