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Comment by npn | Hacker News Reader

It is insanely profitable though, if you cut out r&d cost, plus the marketing and loss leaders. Don't let them gaslight you.

Even anthropic who does not own any hardware still have a big margin providing claude models.

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Then why haven't they reported any profits using GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles)? They all use ARR which is easily gamed.

I don't really sure, but might be they count hardware purchase as loss, too.

Google has just recently upgraded their TPUs.

They aren't profitable on a GAAP basis and no one claims this. This obsession over profits is misguided. These are hyper growth companies growing at a scale never seen before. It is both deliberate and uncontroversial to invest in growth rather than slowing down to produce profits.

If my retirement money is going to end up invested in these companies, either directly when they IPO or indirectly through compute providers, then I would like to see some proof that they are capable of producing profits. "Trust me bro" just ain't gonna cut it.

Everything is insanely profitable if you ignore the costs.

They immediately undercut their argument to the point that I'm not sure if they were being sarcastic.

The premise is if they stop training new models then it will become pure profit after 2 years when the hardware finished paying for itself.

It's pretty funny that everyone say that this business is unsustainable, but I have yet seen anyone bankrupt, even the pure hardware providers who are renting out a100 b200.

And AI investors and stock market boosters are just going to accept OpenAI not having anything "new" to show for all their investments? What about replacing hardware once it's been burned out from constant high usage? Is it not odd to you that so many big AI deals get announced and never heard from again? What's the business reason for neoclouds buying GPU's from NVIDIA only for NVIDIA to then pay them to rent them back? How does this make any sense?

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