Thread

1. user43928 · 1790788136 · focus · HN ↗

   > All this must mean the Western AI companies are now extremely inference-margin positive.

   > So the Chinese labs have thrown a lifeline to the Western loss-making labs, and I just have no clue as to why.

   That inference wasn't profitable is a widespread myth.

   Analysis based on Kimi K3 suggests that OpenAI and Anthropic have margins well north of 95%: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;inferencex.semianalysis.com&#x2F;run&#x2F;kimi-k3-on-b200" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;inferencex.semianalysis.com&#x2F;run&#x2F;kimi-k3-on-b200

   Over the last months I have seen news that OpenAI made breakthroughs in inference efficiency multiple times.

   I have no reason to believe that the leading US labs don&#x27;t have their own optimizations, or that they learned of this particular optimization from DeepSeek.

   1. dgellow · 1790797489 · focus · HN ↗

      95% margin is really unlikely. Anthropic recently said they have 80% gross margin when using their adjusted ebidta (ie if they do not consider revenue sharing, training expenses, and a bunch of other costs). They wouldn’t be talking about non standard metrics if they had such high margin on inference

      1. user43928 · 1790843692 · focus · HN ↗

         What we were talking about here is the margin on inference as in:

         Cost per GPU hour versus API price of generated tokens assuming 100% utilization.

         This could be a margin around 98.3% for 5.6 Sol.

         If the utilization of the GPU was 25%, it would drop to 93.1%.

         Revenue sharing or training expenses are not considered here in this &quot;inference margin&quot;.

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