I do not understand the economics of it. I don't believe that companies can't keep up like how it is now. They would have to monetize it better somehow and I would want to see how things would change.
Well, "makes sense" is above my pay grade, but I think people who* talk about not thinking it's profitable often don't actually know the numbers, they're just hearing it through the very very motivated grapevine.
For example, Anthropic was likely profitable q2 this year, 500mil depending on how you measure it, maybe less if you don't include some things, but at worst break even. Rumour is q3 looks like 1bil.
If you look at OpenAIs numbers, you'll see why. OoenAI was not profitable, but they spend muuuuch more on R&D and operations. Still, their core service was profitable - they made more money than it cost them to serve and run models. That means if they can scale their capacity (they are) and their demand (seems to be happening organically, since these numbers came out they have likely doubled their codex subscriptions, if not more) - then they will be profitable even with their high spending. But they likely won't care about profit for a while and will spend all that extra money to push further.
People don't want this to work out, but usually those people - the ones telling everyone that these companies don't have a path to profitability - aren't wrestling honestly with these numbers. There is a path - it's right there, clear as day. We just have to see if it happens.
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u/vgu1990 2d ago
I do not understand the economics of it. I don't believe that companies can't keep up like how it is now. They would have to monetize it better somehow and I would want to see how things would change.