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_sword commented on Are OpenAI and Anthropic losing money on inference?   martinalderson.com/posts/... · Posted by u/martinald
ozgune · 5 days ago
I agree that you could get to high margins, but I think the modeling holds only if you're an AI lab operating at scale with a setup tuned for your model(s). I think the most open study on this one is from the DeepSeek team: https://github.com/deepseek-ai/open-infra-index/blob/main/20...

For others, I think the picture is different. When we ran benchmarks on DeepSeek-R1 on 8x H200 SXM using vLLM, we got up to 12K total tok/s (concurrency 200, input:output ratio of 6:1). If you're spiking up 100-200K tok/s, you need a lot of GPUs for that. Then, the GPUs sit idle most of the time.

I'll read the blog post in more detail, but I don't think the following assumptions hold outside of AI labs.

* 100% utilization (no spikes, balanced usage between day/night or weekdays) * Input processing is free (~$0.001 per million tokens) * DeepSeek fits into H100 cards in a way that network isn't the bottleneck

_sword · 4 days ago
I was modeling configurations purpose-built for running specific models in specific workloads. I was trying to figure out how much of a gross margin drag some software companies could have if they hosted their own models and served them up as APIs or as integrated copilots with their other offerings
_sword commented on Are OpenAI and Anthropic losing money on inference?   martinalderson.com/posts/... · Posted by u/martinald
BlindEyeHalo · 5 days ago
Why wouldn't you factor in training? It is not like you can train once and then have the model run for years. You need to constantly improve to keep up with the competition. The lifespan of a model is just a few months at this point.
_sword · 4 days ago
I spoke with management at a couple companies that were training models, and some of them expensed the model training in-period as R&D. That's why
_sword commented on Are OpenAI and Anthropic losing money on inference?   martinalderson.com/posts/... · Posted by u/martinald
_sword · 5 days ago
I've done the modeling on this a few times and I always get to a place where inference can run at 50%+ gross margins, depending mostly on GPU depreciation and how good the host is at optimizing utilization. The challenge for the margins is whether or not you consider model training costs as part of the calculation. If model training isn't capitalized + amortized, margins are great. If they are amortized and need to be considered... yikes
_sword commented on GPT-5   openai.com/gpt-5/... · Posted by u/rd
_sword · a month ago
Neat, more scalable intelligence for me to tell "plz fix" over my code
_sword commented on Meta invests $14.3B in Scale AI to kick-start superintelligence lab   nytimes.com/2025/06/12/te... · Posted by u/RyanShook
_sword · 3 months ago
Sounds like meta gets the data and also anything they can scrape together about what the other labs have been doing to get better results than meta
_sword commented on OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive   bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/minimaxir
kumarm · 3 months ago
He is second only to Elon in this case (SolarCity, X/XAI).
_sword · 3 months ago
That's why they so despise each-other; they're the same
_sword commented on OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive   bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/minimaxir
_sword · 3 months ago
The self dealing king Sam Altman strikes again
_sword commented on Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?    · Posted by u/ramesh31
_sword · 7 months ago
Even before LLMs were popularized, the shift to remote work made hiring awful in my experience. In finance roles, I had candidates who aced their tests and projects but then showed up to the job unable to competently use excel or write coherent sentences in English. Phone / zoom interviews all went fine, but clearly there was rampant cheating during remote projects.
_sword commented on Ask HN: Are there any real examples of AI agents doing work?    · Posted by u/nomad-nigiri
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 · 8 months ago
I have not seen one in production, but I did see 'agent products' sold to financial companies for compliance purposes ( sanctions, mortgage, other regs ). Fascinating stuff that got me mildly interested in MS troupe.
_sword · 8 months ago
Could you name any products?

u/_sword

KarmaCake day579July 30, 2012View Original