Brand new industry, massive capital, dropping inference costs, increasing availability of compute, cost centers / subsidized subscriptions are common in SaaS, heavy competition, no public information on actual utilization rates.

How much is Waymo burning a year? 3B on 300M ARR? Anthropic is what 5B on 20B ARR? Waymo is 3x older. Why don't we hear such confident statements about how subsidized their rides are?

It's one thing to speculate it's another to parade it as fact. Even if the S1 reveals an unprofitable business today, you can still only claim it's unlikely.

> How much is Waymo burning a year? 3B on 300M ARR? Anthropic is what 5B on 20B ARR? Waymo is 3x older. Why don't we hear such confident statements about how subsidized their rides are?

We do. We hear it less often because no-one is talking about how Waymo changes how we all need to work or whatever, that's all.

Do people commonly argue Waymo isn't subsidizing rates?

Also, we do have some evidence for my position:

- We know that the consumer Claude plans provide _way_ more tokens than you could get if you were paying API prices. This is a huge part of why Anthropic's limits on other harnesses for subscription customers is such a big deal. So either their profit margin on API tokens is absurdly high, most consumer subscribers don't come anywhere near their rate limits, or they're losing money on the consumer subscriptions. - It appears that complains about people running into rate limits are common, which suggests the "consumers usually don't use much of their subscription" explanation is incorrect. - We also know that Anthropic has just become profitable, almost certainly driven mostly by enterprise customers. This rules out the "they make a very high profit margin on the API" explanation, since if that was the case they'd likely have been profitable much earlier.

Taken together, I think the case that their consumer subscriptions lose them money on net is pretty strong, even though their enterprise subscriptions (and API pricing) does make them a profit.

> I think the case that their consumer subscriptions lose them money on net is pretty strong, even though their enterprise subscriptions (and API pricing) does make them a profit.

To be clear I'm not arguing against this position, just questioning the confidence with which people claim that the current consumer subs are not a sustainable offering and a merely temporary.

Burning money is never sustainable. All you're actually saying is nobody can predict how long this particular bonfire will burn.

Again this is nonsense for the reasons I've already given. The costs aren't fixed.

Whether sustainability is achieved by raising prices or hoping that costs can be brought down, you have to acknowledge that the status quo is unsustainable. If it were sustainable nether change would be necessary.