Ed Zittrain

How does Anthropic become profitable?

And my God, if someone says they're profitable on inference, that comment came from three separate times when Anthropic's Dario Amadei, Mr. Wario himself, has said, well, here's a stylized fact.

Say you're 50% profitable on inference.

It's always this weird duck and weave thing that is decidedly non-gap.

And also entirely made up, like he even said it was made up.

So people have come up with this vision that inference is profitable.

If it was, 85% of Anthropic's revenue comes from API calls.

Why is Anthropic losing billions of dollars a year then?

And if the answer is training, okay, when does training go away?

Why is training getting more expensive every year?

The answer is training is a cost of goods.

There is no profitability for any of this, and you have to keep training the models because of model drift.

Yes, but this would be like if Uber paid for the cars, paid for the gas.

The gas was giraffe blood.

They paid for the customer's clothes.

I'm being facetious, but the economics of Uber were also... To a different degree, yes.

Well, also, they didn't do the same kind of subsidy.

They made a trip cheaper, way cheaper, way, I remember those days, way cheaper, but they didn't charge, like they still charge trip to trip, point to point even.

This is, we are charging, you're paying $20 to drive 100 miles a month, except in reality, each mile is costing Uber 25 bucks or more.

And there is no compelling argument as to how that changes.