The point is that the unit economics are way worse because inference is expensive. Cost of goods sold matters, even if you're reinvesting profits.
But we don't have visibility on the COGS until they IPO and file, right? So where is all this premature judgement coming from about their unit economics?
(not pointing the finger only at you, at least you identified that gross margins is the correct thing to look at rather than net profit!)
I think a lot of us are calling it out because it's a contrast to SaaS/ads businesses where incremental goods sold are practically free compared to R&D, so spending can be looked at as one-time investments. There's very little additional COGS per additional customer in those businesses, so the default assumption to treat AI like other tech businesses has a blind spot.
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Anthropic is not MoviePass. Its unit economics will be fine after it decides to optimize for profitability.
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Inference has dropped by like 75% from a year ago. While anthropic does offer more tokens now for the same money, the value of the business is based on an expectation of future profits. There are dozens, if not hundreds of examples of companies being valued this way.
You could be right but the unit economics matter to this business in a way they don't for a SaaS or ads business, they're not free and you can't just point at revenue.
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