It's also unclear wherever the subscription price is the real cost, or the API.
I suspect it's closer to the sub price and anthropic is just milking their API users, but that's something you'd only know from the inside
It's also unclear wherever the subscription price is the real cost, or the API.
I suspect it's closer to the sub price and anthropic is just milking their API users, but that's something you'd only know from the inside
Generally speaking, B2B prices are rarely supply-and-demand priced in the usual sense.
YC has advised startups in the past that it's easier to sell a single $100k customer than 100 $1k customers.
It would also be relatively surprising to learn that i.e. the Chinese providers are OOMs better at inference than OAI/Anthropic (like their prices would imply if they were in a perfectly competitive market).
Chinese prices aren't really OOM cheaper. Deepseek recently did a big price hike too.
The one thing I trust is that Chinese prices aren't overinflated. They're almost certainly closer to the actual cost of inference + training amortization than what Western labs are offering.
DeepSeek's price hike is mostly driven by increased demand, for example. It's not about losses so much as they don't have enough infrastructure and need to reduce demand somehow.
Fair, I hadn't looked recently. It looks like currently kimi is either 1/2 or 1/4 Ant pricing depending on whether you think Opus 5 is usable or not. (Deepseek is still an OOM though)
Costs also have to include the amortized training costs.
But the API price is likely simply regular supply and demand, charging as much as the market will pay. Corporations are dropping insane amounts because it's still peanuts for many industries. Software has just been ridiculously cheap before AI. So high prices are still low for companies if it eases some bottlenecks.
The costs only have to include amortized training costs if you are trying to be profitable overall. Having positive unit economics and VC subsidized fixed costs is pretty standard.
Open weight SOTA models are not greatly cheaper than Anthropic and providers don't have to cover training capex.