> I suspect the API prices are already served at prices with profitable unit economics.
There is absolutely no evidence to support this.
There is absolutely no evidence to support this.
Obviously this is an extremely rough calculation. I can even be off by a factor of 10 and it's still a pretty good return.
Training is akin to the cost of building the software/product. Inference is selling the product.
In my opinion, it’s a profitable kind of service. They probably don’t pay the public prices for the cloud GPUs though.
Or, as I would say if I were Bugs Bunny, “Duck Season”
Analysts like Semi-Analysis have done a lot of modeling and estimates on the topic.
But two can play this game: There is absolutely no evidence to support that API prices do not have profitable unit economics.
Typically the burden of proof is on the one making the claim.
They have some of the best publicly available analysis on these topics. The full details and numbers are hidden behind the institutional accounts which are priced for investors (not something you sign up for personally) but they're generous with what they send out in their newsletter.
If you're not familiar with resources like this I could understand how you'd assume that the providers are hemorrhaging money on inference costs, because that is that story that gets parroted around spaces like Hacker News.
You could ignore all of that, though, and go check OpenRouter to see how much providers are selling high parameter count models. They're not entirely at the level of the SOTA models, but the biggest open weight models are not that far behind in complexity either. They're being sold an order of magnitude cheaper than what you pay for the APIs from the major players. We don't know exactly how big the major models are, but it's unlikely that they're more than 10X more compute intensive from the leaks we do have.
I want to see their S-1s, then we can fight.