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Comment by petesergeant | Hacker News Reader

I’m an AI enthusiast, and it’s not clear to me that selling inference to a prop model is a winning business model, which is what Anthropic and OpenAI are doing. The open models are good enough today for many things, and are likely to only get better. Feels like inference is a commodity, and not clear how much money there is in it.

I would love to know how much of the inference I pay for is being paid for by VC cash: I suspect a lot of it.

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To be fair though though, the "open" models are fairly sketchy as well, from a business standpoint, because somebody is paying for a lot of GPUs and expensive talent. It's probably the least obviously sustainable open source product of all time, and it's not at all clear to me why that would change going forward.

Right now there seem to be roughly two paths, when it comes to frontier-level LLMs: Meta just not giving a fuck, spending instagram money and pretending it's a business, and whatever Deepseek is doing that might make it both good and also super cost-effective (and there it's even less clear, how much of it is real and what the actual costs are).

> I would love to know how much of the inference I pay for is being paid for by VC cash: I suspect a lot of it.

Definitely a lot of VC subsidies for OpenAI and Anthropic, none for Google.

Sure, that doesn’t mean we’re not getting subsidised tokens from Google though

yeah, most of it

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