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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29730 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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This is the best analysis that I've seen with regards to OpenAI's business model. OpenAI in particular seems pretty hosed unless they can crack AGI or at least some sort of currently non-existent network, data or technological moat, or else their only option seems to be to angle their way into a bail-out.

Anthropic at least is a true believer in AGI and is well aware of the risks of over-capitalizing even if AI does end up making huge breakthroughs. They're better positioned with having made less spending commitments and having pivoted into enterprise, but they still ultimately need AGI or some sort of moat to make it in the mid-long term.

But inference is profitable!

I mean, it is, but selling tokens by themselves is inevitably going to be a commoditized business. The price of inference is going to be a race to the bottom with compute buildouts and efficiency improvements, and selling tokens, for as long as Chinese models can get 90% as good within 6-9 months for a fraction of the price, is not going to make a trillion dollar business.

Still, at the end of the day the finances don't really matter in my view; if they do crack AGI then the finances start rapidly fixing themselves and/or stop being relevant very quickly, and even if they don't and go bust all the researchers will still exist, and there still will be cheap distilled open-weights Chinese models served at commodity prices, the genie isn't going back into the bottle.

Is inference really profitable? Maybe in and of itself, but these companies use so many accounting tricks that it's hard to tell. Every new model requires huge R&D and capital expenditures, which have to be amortized over the lifespan of the product, which isn't infinite since these companies rely on constant expansion to stay in the hype cycle. Could Open AI turn a profit if it stuck to selling it's current models and cut its R&D and capital spending to something similar to a normal company? Or does it require the constant promise of a super product to keep the hype cycle going?

You can pay per token for open weights models served by third parties that are a few months behind SOTA if you don't believe that the first party cost per token is real.

Inference is unquestionably profitable in and of itself on API pricing, given that there's plenty of third-party inference providers selling tokens for dirt cheap and price/capability has fallen by orders of magnitude.

Whether inference is still profitable after factoring in R&D and all the costs that go into training each model is an open question; Epoch AI have a good post trying to estimate this.

Really, it's academic though, because even if it was profitable the frontier labs can't actually cut the R&D and capital expenditures; if they tried, they'd get dragged down within 12 months by distilled models and commodity hardware, so in the end it's reach heaven [AGI] or die.

OpenAI in particular seems pretty hosed unless they can crack AGI or at least some sort of currently non-existent network, data or technological moat, or else their only option seems to be to angle their way into a bail-out.

OpenAI's model is the base for Copilot, yes? Are they just hoping to eventually be bought out?

While Microsoft certainly has a history of paying big bucks for companies whose products it will then run into the ground (e.g. Skype), at 840G$ OpenAI might be a bit large for them to just swallow outright.

If OpenAI was years ahead of the competition, Microsoft might still shell out that kind of money to gain a monopoly on coding assistants, but that is thankfully not the case.

Seems unlikely. There's no indications Microsoft wants to buy them out, and it would be largely unviable without a huge drop in OpenAI's valuation regardless

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