[sarchertech]

It’s a brand new market that they want to claim a share of. I doubt they would be making much money of selling deepseek inference right now even if it were profitable, so why not throw sum subsidies at it for a little while in the hope that you are one of the big names left standing once everyone runs out of money.

[JimDabell]

You didn’t answer my question: do you think they are doing this?

AWS already have a strategy in place for what you describe. They are very liberal in giving out credits. They don’t do it by subsidising prices.

[sarchertech]

I don’t know enough to be certain either way. But I will say that I know that Amazon has operated certain product segments at a loss before. Whether that’s with direct price subsidies or credits is irrelevant in the face of a new product with hype unlike anything I’ve ever seen in over 20 years in the industry. It’s highly plausible in the face of this absolute mania and FOMO that Amazon is operating open source inference at a loss to gain market share. They might think that inference prices will drop in the future.

They might be panicking because they don’t have good models of their own. Or they might just be price matching other open source inference providers. They have cut prices to keep up with competition many times over the years.

Whether they are doing it or not, you don’t know they aren’t, and it’s plausible that they are. So the claim that starts with “we know that people are making a profit selling open source inference at X price therefore Y” is unfounded.