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Comment by simianwords | Hacker News Reader

Good questions. The post you are replying to is also based on vibes. So how about we make a bet and come back after IPO filings?

But isn't it okay to suggest that random 3rd party hosting companies are ... not losing money? Why?

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I'll bet 50€ that big AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI) have bad regarding their core financials. Excluding one time deals such as renting hardware, external cash infusions, the core AI model business (training models and selling inference) is unprofitable and will be be at the expected scales (50 billion € or more) for the next 5 years at least.

I bet that within 5 years they will be sold for scrap to bigger companies and will become divisions inside them.

This is not fair, lets just speak about Inference margins. You are bringing 100 other things to make it more ambgigous.

    Statement: margins API prices of all models are greater than 10% in Anthropic.

Feel free to either agree to what I'm saying or bet otherwise.

1. You can't have a model without training. Training is part of the cost. A model trained 5 years ago is borderline useless. Also models cannot be retrained continuously, we do not have the technology (even if we had it, it would just increase the ongoing operational cost).

2. Rephrasing your statement:

  At June 2026 prices, profit margins for all Anthropic models are >10%.

That claim is super defensive. Serving a model can only be done if the model has been built and trained, can't have it any other way. Building it and training it costs lots of money.

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.

> 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.

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