They have infinite money to burn so they aren't going to optimize.
I've seen that trivial changes to workflows can token usage by 30%. Repeat this a few times and my token usage has plummeted over the last few months.
Only outputting test failures instead of having agents read test run output in real time. Not having build logs get fed into context. Projects like UCL (unified context layer) so agents don't rediscover the same facts about a code base again and again.
Giving tools agent output modes so they only print out the minimal info needed for an agent to get work done.
When I hear a company has an absurd AI spend I assume they aren't even trying to reign it in.
IPOs aren't the magical moment that they were in decades past. You get to answer to a bunch of retirement fund managers and "the market", meaning less-savvy retail investors. You have to open up your books.
It seems like Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. are doing an IPO because they are literally out of other options. Older IPOs like Facebook felt different, like the hard part had been done, and they just had to scale. There's a difference in selling something because you want to, versus selling something because you have to. Facebook was just relying on the idea that they were a platform that more people would inevitably sign up for. For the most part, they did. It seemed obvious. They likely could have continued on by simply operating privately, but the IPO gave them capital to dominate the market.
Anthropic and other hyperscalers cannot continue on privately. They're facing a systemic shortage of capital to achieve their goals. They need the infrastructure, and there's not enough capacity to make enough for all of these companies to survive.