He's an interested party. His investments are worth a lot more if he says that tokens are sold at a profit. I don't understand how anyone would trust him?
It’s unlikely that Claude is proportionally that bigger and more expensive to serve so profit margins on inference must be pretty decent
Even if they are “profitable” how many Uber drivers are “profitable” because they aren’t correctly calculating asset depreciation. Maybe these guys are doing the same thing.
Maybe it’s a lot of people who already had GPUs for crypto mining, and they’ve moved over to this, so that if they need to grow and buy new GPUs the costs would dramatically grow.
To an extent maybe, but that market is almost entirely commoditized already. Besides Cerebras and maybe Groq (which already charge a slight premium) all the other providers are more less interchangeable.
> Maybe it’s a lot of people who already had GPUs for crypto mining
I’m not sure the type of GPUs that were most popular for crypto are at all useful for LLMs?
If there’s a few providers subsidizing, that’s the price ceiling. Everyone who wants to compete has to subsidize.
Now if this market had been operating for years, I’d say that it’s likely all these companies are profitable or close to it. But the market is so new and there’s so much hype, I find it very plausible that none of these guys are making a profit and they all hope to just hang in until all the subsidies go away.
> I’m not sure the type of GPUs that were most popular for crypto are at all useful for LLMs?
There’s some overlap. I’ve definitely read about people repurposing.