What hardware is needed, how much of it, cooling, and what does it all cost you?
Or are you saying I can take my old desktop and serve Deepseek v3.2 to 10k users simultaneously and it would cost me about $1 per megatoken?
Obviously they are not subsidised, do you disagree? If you agree, they have a way to price it at a point that people wanna pay for it and also they aren't losing money.
So there's nothing inherent about inference that makes it too costly or whatever.
> Obviously they are not subsidised, do you disagree? If you agree, they have a way to price it at a point that people wanna pay for it and also they aren't losing money.
> So there's nothing inherent about inference that makes it too costly or whatever.
Do we have audited GAAP financial data for any of these companies? If we don't, all these are... vibes, man.
But isn't it okay to suggest that random 3rd party hosting companies are ... not losing money? Why?
I bet that within 5 years they will be sold for scrap to bigger companies and will become divisions inside them.
Statement: margins API prices of all models are greater than 10% in Anthropic.
2. Rephrasing your statement:
At June 2026 prices, profit margins for all Anthropic models are >10%.
Even so, fine, I'll take that bet. Anthropic inference prices are still marginally subsdizided. Once they're public they will hike their API prices several times over the next 24 months. Even that might not save them, because when we take all their expenses into account, they will probably need to raise prices 2-3x compared to their June 2026 prices.
Ok lets state the bet like this: 5 months after their IPO, it will be clear that their API prices still have greater than 10% margin.
It said: upfront investment: $3M to $6M.
Customers should pay $25k per month.
Checks out
>The "$25k per month" figure is almost certainly the result of ChatGPT making assumptions, not a fact derived from any known business model.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a28193b-6ec0-8333-a1af-d07e8d89ef...
Your whole calculation is also ridiculous - I think you assumed what revenue per month is required to pay off hardware within a year? Why would I use hardware within a year?
I would suggest consulting with ChatGPT and coming up with a better and more coherent argument.
Minimum upfront: about $15M
Comfortable upfront: $20M–$25M
Monthly revenue needed: $900k–$1.5M
Required price per 10k individual customers: $99–$149/month
API-equivalent output price: usually $8–$20/M output tokens, unless utilization is very high.
I try to do some napkin math of what it takes to start a company serving an LLM to customers. I thought maybe 10,000 users sounded like a reasonable number.
I'd like also to compare it to traditional Internet companies, e.g. Twitter. I'd guess Twitter with 10k users would cost me literally a dumpster dive, so essentially no cost.
If I were to start an LLM company, what would my initial investment look like?
Turns out around 15+ million dollars assuming I would get 10,000 users willing to pay 200$/month.
I just don't see how the numbers you show add up.