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Comment by combobyte | Hacker News Reader

> We like money, and Anthropic should stay in a position to make loads of it despite any competition.

In a position to lose loads of money, maybe.

Even without China eating their lunch, there's zero reason to believe Anthropic will ever be profitable.

They might just merge with OpenAI. Right now it seems they are still working out who might come out on top but they are both burning tons of money and essentially offer the exact same product up to some minor differences, economically it makes much more sense for them to collude instead of compete for the same market. They might be colluding already for all we know. If they manage to push out foreign competitors they can probably divvy up the Western market quite profitably as their domestic competitors would have less than 20 % (?) market share together?

I don't see how merging or colluding fixes their problems, though. Both companies burn cash at historic rates because inference costs a lot more than people want to pay for it. Even if they somehow manage to crowd out any competitors and fix the price of AI, that price can't be much higher than it is today or people will just decide to stop paying for it.

No amount of collusion can solve the core economics problem of compute.

They could ~halve their training costs with collusion.

Instead of each paying full price to generate a SOTA model in competition, they could share the result and split the cost. This gets even simpler if they merge.

OpenAI is in a way worth situation financially speaking, with a ridiculous amount of spending commitment, would be really strange to merge with it

> In a position to lose loads of money, maybe.

you can say you're pre-revenue and you're a potential pure play

(Link to the reference for those who don’t know: https://youtu.be/BzAdXyPYKQo?si=dJDP6BRiZwqd5mcW)

I hope there is a lucky one in ten thousand out there https://xkcd.com/1053/

The hammer is open weight models, and the anvil is Apple's m7 chips with higher memory bandwidth

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