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> As I said above, I don’t think a single AI company is remotely in the black yet.

As I note above, Anthropic probably is in the black. $4B ARR, and spending less than $100M on training models.



It looks like their revenue has indeed increased dramatically this year but I can’t find anything saying they’re profitable, which I assume they’d be loudly proclaiming if it had happened. That being said looking at the charts in some of these articles it looks like they might pull it off! I need to look more closely at their pricing model, I wonder what they’re doing differently


Why would they want to be profitable? Genuine question.

Profit is for companies that don't have anything else to spend money on, not ones trying to grow.


I guess my genuine question in response is can you tell investors "Please give us billions of dollars - we never plan on being profitable, just endlessly growing and raising money from outside sources"? Unless the goal is to be sold off eventually that seems a bit like a hard sell.


> "Please give us billions of dollars - we never plan on being profitable, just endlessly growing and raising money from outside sources"?

The goal for investors is to be able to exit their investment for more than they put in.

That doesn't mean the company needs to be profitable at all.

Broadly speaking, investors look for sustainable growth. Think Amazon, when they were spending as much money as possible in the early 2000s to build their distribution network and software and doing anything they possibly could to avoid becoming profitable.

Most of the time companies (and investors) don't look for profits. Profits are just a way of paying more tax. Instead the ideal outcome is growing revenue that is cost negative (ie, could be possible) but the excess money is invested in growing more.

Note that this doesn't mean the company is raising money from external sources. Not being profitable doesn't imply that.


I know very little about this. But isn't the inference cost the big one. Not the training?




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