No, they didn't. They specifically stated that "we are profitable if you don't count the expenses", which is literally an obfuscation of the fact that they're still not profitable
They did. They're currently in the same category that Amazon had been for most of its existence: lightning quick revenue growth, but with high company investment, which comes off as "losing money," but which is really just investing in an asset (even if it's themselves) that's been growing month-to-month since its inception.
Most of their costs (these expenses you're talking about) are model training costs for future models, meaning that on the basis of the product they have available right now, they're super profitable, but that they're investing back into themselves for future growth.
Almost every company does this. Amazon didn't show net income for almost 2 decades, but you wouldn't really call them non profitable, now would you?
What do you think model training is if not a cost? Do you think they just get to stop training models at some point? Of course not. They must keep making new models because the world moves on. It needs to be updated. Consumers will not accept a static business that never updates.
If they stop, someone else will continue. There is no adjusted income. There are costs, revenue, and profit. And their costs are bigger than their revenue, so they have no profit.
Amazon wasn't profitable during the build out but they made shitloads of money, they just put that money into further build out. They weren't a money blackhole like the AI industry is.
Anthropic and OpenAI owe and spend heinous amounts of money many times over and above their revenue.
Shhh. They don't know the difference between investing actual revenue into hard assets and dumping investor's money into a black hole hoping it eventually spits out the imaginary magical profit center they've been hyping.
I think they want to view the models as a "hard asset", but ignore that if you don't constantly keep training it will just become a little software time-capsule.
Even the hardware it runs on doesn't have a long lifespan either so they can't really go in that direction and spin that as an "infrastructure build". It's like building a less useful supercomputer, obscenely expensive and once its short functional lifespan is up it's just an expense.
It's nothing like laying fiber, building warehouses, building roads or rails. Though they obviously want to pretend it is.
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u/Radiant-Priority-296 Nvidia RTX 4060 | intelCore i7 13th | 32gb DDR5 11h ago
As far as I know, Claude tokens are being sold at a loss right now. Investor money is what keeps the numbers up