No business that is built entirely on AI is profitable. Not one.
The major players behind them all
nvidia, microsoft, google, oracle, etc are all profitable
Training is an ongoing expense, not a startup expense.
inference is profitable, training is not
training is what the majority of data centre spend is going towards
if they want to be profitable pull back the training but right now they are competing for market share
feel free to look back at all the times lemmy predicted the end of spotify because it wasn’t profitable, now they turn around and cry it’s making money
Qwen, running in a well-designed harness such as OpenCode, with a carefully written AGENTS.md file, is of comparable performance to at least Claude Sonnet, and possibly Claude Opus. All without the massive, ludicrous infrastructure requirements.
At work nobody is talking like this, everyone is talking about claude and it makes sense, it’s the best thing since vscode
nvidia, microsoft, google, oracle, etc are all profitable
NVIDIA is a hugely profitable hardware company. Not an AI model provider. They’re selling the shovels for the gold rush. And their profits will tank as soon as one of the model providers fold, though pivoting back to consumer hardware is definitely an option for them.
Microsoft is a hugely profitable business and consumer software company. Again, not an AI model provider. They have trained a couple models, but have made no profit on serving them. Their add-on “Copilot” services aren’t profitable (hence the recent enormous price hikes for GitHub Copilot, which has resulted in a bunch of companies scaling back their AI usage). All of Microsoft’s profit comes from software sales.
Google is a hugely profitable software company as well - but again, not with AI. Their model, Gemini, isn’t remotely profitable, and has similar costs to maintain as Anthropic and OpenAI see for their models. Heck, they just did a fundraising round for the first time in years to support it, which is NOT a sign of a healthy AI business.
Oracle is also profitable in software, but they’ve staked their company on hardware roll-outs supporting data centers for OpenAI. They’ve booked future profit from OpenAI owing them almost a trillion dollars. If OpenAI can’t pay that bill when the time comes, Oracle is completely fucked.
inference is profitable, training is not
When I don’t include the costs of doing business, my business is profitable! That’s silly. Inference might be very slightly in the green now when viewed by itself (although that’s deeply questionable; no actual GAAP accounting has shown it to be so). But since training is an ongoing expense that frontier model providers have to constantly engage in, their companies are - and will remain - very deeply in the red.
And without seeing GAAP accounting showing where all the money goes in support of inference, I am highly doubtful that it’s profitable.
training is what the majority of data centre spend is going towards
if they want to be profitable pull back the training but right now they are competing for market share
They can’t. Ever. Pulling back on training means allowing model drift. You need to understand that models are obsolete the moment they’re released. Their training data is set in stone. New version of Typescript ships? Some celebrity dies? Big election happens? The model not only doesn’t know about any of it, it can’t be updated. The best you can manage is throwing MCP and RAG at it in the hopes that the model will pay attention to it, but the point of diminishing returns on that arrives almost instantaneously. You have to train. Constantly.
feel free to look back at all the times lemmy predicted the end of spotify because it wasn’t profitable, now they turn around and cry it’s making money
Bad comparison. Spotify has already been a profitable, publicly-traded company for years.
And - this part’s important - I’m not Lemmy. The platform we’re having this conversation on has nothing to do with whether or not the AI model providers are profitable.
At work nobody is talking like this, everyone is talking about claude and it makes sense, it’s the best thing since vscode
Anecdotes aren’t data. But as long as we’re swapping anecdotes, here’s mine: I work with actual machine-learning engineers. They’re the ones who bag on Anthropic and OpenAI the most. And they use Qwen, Gemma, and a few other small, open-source, open-weight models. Have you looked at Hugging Face? Its community is huge, and growing daily. No one wants to be locked in to Claude Code or any other proprietary development tool when the service has been unstable and the pricing has becoming ridiculous in their desperate attempts to become profitable.
The cost for using Qwen tokens is $0, no matter how many tokens they use.
You say no one talks like this… Are you sure you’re listening?
They’ve booked future profit from OpenAI owing them almost a trillion dollars. If OpenAI can’t pay that bill when the time comes, Oracle is completely fucked.
I’d say they’re the ones most likely to get screwed on this but I just don’t see how a tech titan drawdown causes the whole world go into a great depression
This isn’t 1987 where only upper middle class people invest in stocks, everyone has a stock app on their phone these days, if jobs aren’t lost money will continue to pump because line goes up
Maybe I’m just too optimistic but if captain dickfingers giving the world a tariff hit, a global pandemic and “the worst oil crisis ever” can’t put a dent in things, I just don’t think a pullback on AI spend is going to do it (unless there’s a ton of other structural problems in the global economy that bloggers will point out how obvious it was only once it fails)
Bad comparison. Spotify has already been a profitable, publicly-traded company for years.
That doesn’t wipe my memory of listening to reddit users and lemmy users since 2012 talk about how streaming music is unprofitable and will go broke any day, to which I argued they are after market share (to which I received many a downvote, lemmy eh?)
Remember how Uber was about to go broke? Not going to lie, this literally feels like just more circlejerking about companies that are spending a lot and will go broke any day now…
5 minutes ago Lemmy was comparing AI to NFT’s and Crypto, in 2026!
Sorry if I hold a grudge and you are not as dim-witted and not good with computers as the average lemmy user, it’s hard to shake hearing the same prophecies I’ve been hearing about other high spending companies for decades
And without seeing GAAP accounting showing where all the money goes in support of inference, I am highly doubtful that it’s profitable.
You’re right but we do have a little bit of an idea:
On inference alone, both companies project profitability
Claude is now embedded in 60% of Fortune 500 companies’ productivity suites as of Q2 2025
They are very clearly in the business segment, I’ve heard nothing like this for Qwen or GLM or local hosted models, in fact when self hosting was bought up the dev’s mentioned “??? you can’t self host claude ??”
I work with actual machine-learning engineers
This is like saying I work with actual system admins, they say that Windows is terrible and that it’ll be the year of the linux desktop any day now
You need to vibe check the office and devs vs the engineers
The vibe in the office (and what I’m reading) is that claude is gold
That said I spoke to a normal person the other day and they hadn’t heard of claude at all, blew my mind
The major players behind them all
nvidia, microsoft, google, oracle, etc are all profitable
inference is profitable, training is not
training is what the majority of data centre spend is going towards
if they want to be profitable pull back the training but right now they are competing for market share
feel free to look back at all the times lemmy predicted the end of spotify because it wasn’t profitable, now they turn around and cry it’s making money
At work nobody is talking like this, everyone is talking about claude and it makes sense, it’s the best thing since vscode
https://lemmy.world/post/48781135
When I don’t include the costs of doing business, my business is profitable! That’s silly. Inference might be very slightly in the green now when viewed by itself (although that’s deeply questionable; no actual GAAP accounting has shown it to be so). But since training is an ongoing expense that frontier model providers have to constantly engage in, their companies are - and will remain - very deeply in the red.
And without seeing GAAP accounting showing where all the money goes in support of inference, I am highly doubtful that it’s profitable.
They can’t. Ever. Pulling back on training means allowing model drift. You need to understand that models are obsolete the moment they’re released. Their training data is set in stone. New version of Typescript ships? Some celebrity dies? Big election happens? The model not only doesn’t know about any of it, it can’t be updated. The best you can manage is throwing MCP and RAG at it in the hopes that the model will pay attention to it, but the point of diminishing returns on that arrives almost instantaneously. You have to train. Constantly.
Bad comparison. Spotify has already been a profitable, publicly-traded company for years.
And - this part’s important - I’m not Lemmy. The platform we’re having this conversation on has nothing to do with whether or not the AI model providers are profitable.
Anecdotes aren’t data. But as long as we’re swapping anecdotes, here’s mine: I work with actual machine-learning engineers. They’re the ones who bag on Anthropic and OpenAI the most. And they use Qwen, Gemma, and a few other small, open-source, open-weight models. Have you looked at Hugging Face? Its community is huge, and growing daily. No one wants to be locked in to Claude Code or any other proprietary development tool when the service has been unstable and the pricing has becoming ridiculous in their desperate attempts to become profitable.
The cost for using Qwen tokens is $0, no matter how many tokens they use.
You say no one talks like this… Are you sure you’re listening?
I’d say they’re the ones most likely to get screwed on this but I just don’t see how a tech titan drawdown causes the whole world go into a great depression
This isn’t 1987 where only upper middle class people invest in stocks, everyone has a stock app on their phone these days, if jobs aren’t lost money will continue to pump because line goes up
Maybe I’m just too optimistic but if captain dickfingers giving the world a tariff hit, a global pandemic and “the worst oil crisis ever” can’t put a dent in things, I just don’t think a pullback on AI spend is going to do it (unless there’s a ton of other structural problems in the global economy that bloggers will point out how obvious it was only once it fails)
That doesn’t wipe my memory of listening to reddit users and lemmy users since 2012 talk about how streaming music is unprofitable and will go broke any day, to which I argued they are after market share (to which I received many a downvote, lemmy eh?)
Remember how Uber was about to go broke? Not going to lie, this literally feels like just more circlejerking about companies that are spending a lot and will go broke any day now…
5 minutes ago Lemmy was comparing AI to NFT’s and Crypto, in 2026!
Sorry if I hold a grudge and you are not as dim-witted and not good with computers as the average lemmy user, it’s hard to shake hearing the same prophecies I’ve been hearing about other high spending companies for decades
You’re right but we do have a little bit of an idea:
https://aiafterhours.substack.com/p/openai-vs-anthropic-the-121-billion
https://www.tradingkey.com/analysis/stocks/us-stocks/261756528-anthropic-openai-ipo-tradingkey
I didn’t just say an anecdote, I linked to this as well:
https://lemmy.world/post/48781135
Maybe even a little
They are very clearly in the business segment, I’ve heard nothing like this for Qwen or GLM or local hosted models, in fact when self hosting was bought up the dev’s mentioned “??? you can’t self host claude ??”
This is like saying I work with actual system admins, they say that Windows is terrible and that it’ll be the year of the linux desktop any day now
You need to vibe check the office and devs vs the engineers
The vibe in the office (and what I’m reading) is that claude is gold
That said I spoke to a normal person the other day and they hadn’t heard of claude at all, blew my mind