Hacker News Reader

That’s like saying an apartment building is “profitable” because the rent covers utilities while ignoring the real cost which is the mortgage on the capital cost of the building.

It’s funky math and a good way to quickly go bankrupt.

They make money on each token when you look at the electricity and interconnect fees, but no, I don’t think they’ve turned a profit on their Capex, even a little bit

> The major AI labs are gross profitable when selling access to inference.

Do you have a good source for this?

Well, I can run some models that are better than some of the weaker and cheaper Anthropic models locally, like Haiku 4.5, and solve tasks that would cost ~4500$ every day in tokens, so yeah, they are definitely extremely profitable on inference.

Are you also paying 8,000 employees [1] and funding massive infrastructure [2]?

[1] https://www.makerstations.io/openai-employee-statistics/

[2] https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/