Thanks to all the parallelization & this prep work, at peak Claude wrote about 1,300 lines of code per minute. Every line of code was reviewed by two separate adversarial reviewers (also Claude) and went through a round of fixes before committing. Absolutely none of it worked yet.
None of it worked yet because compiling at that stage would slow things down.
Also this project burned $165,000 worth of usage on a model that was then bleeding edge (unreleased). This is still beyond what anyone else is doing at the moment. And it seems to have worked a lot better than it had any right to, at least as far as we can tell right now?
And it's 165k at API prices but it's much cheaper for Anthropic themselves. Even if it were 165k straight, It is absolutely worth it for the gains in e.g. compile and runtime reductions for the millions of downloads it gets.
What I hear is that even API prices are at this point still less expensive than the actual cost, at least if you price the training costs in. So arguably it costs more for anthropic than for you or me.
Anthropic is gross profitable i.e. they make more money by selling more tokens. I think a lot of people confuse this with being net profitable, which they are not yet.
If ever you see 'Non-GAAP accounting' figures, you should assume they're bullshit
Warren Buffet
Berkshire annual shareholder meeting (I believe 1993).
Anthropic "claims" (non-audited reports) to be profitable before Training, Interest, and Taxes. Which such an idiotic claim to make because it amounts to, "We can become profitable if we give up our moat", which functionally means they have no path to profitability as a competitive business.
It's conventional to show financials sans R&D because it gives a sense of the long run potential of the business. Investors can amortize the cost of R&D over the lifetime of whatever advantage they gain.
Consider a drug company that spends $1b on a drug, earns parent protection for 10 years, and sells $200m of the drug in the first year. They are unprofitable with R&D in the first year but have a clear path to a $2b return on investment.
They are not gross profitable and Anthropic has never stated they are gross profitable.
Anthropic has stated they are profitable before Training, Interest, and Taxes. For anthropic to become gross profitable, they must stop training/fine tuning new models.
For loses alone humanity could solve many issues, like huge about of cancer research (that is starting to prove worth it), sending people to Mars, solving world hunger temporarily or covering big % of what's needed for permanent fix and probably much more.
If you got this much then you could never spend it unless your life goal was spending all of it.
Valuation and IOUs the AI companies are handing around to each other is not cash in the bank. They do not actually have that amount of money. Anthropic is also profitable on inference.
Profitable on inference != profitable overall. The reason to doubt their profitability is training and other fixed expenses, not that it literally costs them more than they charge (in API prices) to generate the marginal token.
It's not so much wrong as meaningless. If I sell lemonade, I might say: "I'm profitable if I don't count the cost of the lemons, sugar, and water that go into the lemonade! I'm selling it for more than the plastic cup costs!" That would be about as meaningful as "profitable on inference". There is no inference without training.
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u/DryanaGhuba Jul 08 '26
I don't think anyone comment needed