Comment by Revanche1367 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Revanche1367 | Hacker News Reader

Great, so they _finally_ decided to add a non-flash model and it's not available to regular subscribers for an indefinite period. What's the point of paying for the AI Ultra plan? Anthropic doing the same with Fable as far as I know, OpenAI at least allows Pro plan subscribers to use Astra. I subscribe to Gemini AI Ultra and ChatGPT Pro, and have enterprise access to Claude at work. To be fair, Gemini's flash models since at least 3.6 have been quite useful for non-complex work, but for any task where there is a bit of complexity involved, I've had to check and recheck the work multiple times myself or sometimes with another LLM to get it to follow plans accurately. It's disappointing to see yet another Gemini release ignore adding newer pro models.

Edit: seems I was wrong about Anthropic restricting Fable, I guess our enterprise plan doesn't include it. But, the block from Anthropic regarding Mythos for regular subscribers/enterprise-users is still true I think.

Fable is available for a couple of months and even got an update on 1st of September. It’s really good, but since Opus 5.5 was released, there is not much point in using Fable anymore

As we’ve seen from the leaked Anthropic prospectus, revenue from actual users is a pittance. What really matters is what you can get from investors, and that you have a model smart enough for self-improvement.

Google's already public, and already makes $400B a year in profit...

They made $11.5B just in Q2 2026, which is $46B annualized, or 10x their 2025 revenue of $4.6B.

That's a lot already and growing quickly.

I could start a business with a similar growth trajectory. We can mail people $100 bills for a low low payment of $10. I just need $500 billion dollars of startup capital and I can show you a 10x yoy growth for a few years.

I'm in. I would like to predicate the entire US economy on your business model.

Except Anthropic had an operating profit in Q2, and your scheme never would.

You're just parroting a headline. They did not actually make a profit in Q2 when you take all of their expenses into account.

You’re just parroting another headline. Adjusted operating profitability is still a milestone.

Tech companies are capital intensive. AI ones especially. Not a surprise that they don’t have GAAP profitability after 5 years.

If they, through standard accounting practices, cannot show they are profitable how do we know they are profitable? I assume they can't just say "we are profitable assuming you ignore the costs we paid to build up XYZ". I'm guessing they could pre - rent compute for 10 years or something and maybe that's all on the balance sheet but you'd just amortize that and I think that falls under GAAP?

That sounds fun but this is people paying for real products and services. The demand is there (and it's growing faster than any other commercial technology in history). They just need to work on inference (and potentially training) costs. I think that's clearly achieveable.

For the record, growth plays have been common in Silicon Valley for many decades. It's how we ended up with all the major tech companies we see today. Of course, it's high risk, high reward.

You can’t just “annualise” your best day. That’s not how it works.

Everyone is cutting back their AI spend because of the ridiculous cost, and a price war is emerging between AI companies.

Check costslice.com - it may help you cut some ai bill.

Oh spare me the pedantry. What else are you going to compare? The year-on-year for Q2? That’s certainly going to have a much higher multiplier.

Your guess is as good as mine on whether these companies will continue growing, stall, or decline. Don’t try to pretend your methodology is more sound though.

We have access to fable on enterprise. It works well, but do you really need to pay that much. Opus 5.5 has been performing well for us, so we're mostly standardizing on that.

I opened my Google account to check the model and honestly have no idea how to access it, whether it exists or not, what is Google AI, what is Gemini, what models are available, where the chatbot is, where the API is, etc..

Honestly, who is in charge of this? How do people even subscribe and make sense of any of this?

Yeah, the naming and proliferation of different tools and sites is confusing. Quickest way I know to get on any plan is via Google One at: https://one.google.com/.

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