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> Anthropic has told shareholders that its adjusted operating income will be positive for a second straight quarter, the Financial Times reported on Sunday,
by _diyar 18d ago
> Anthropic has told shareholders that its adjusted operating income will be positive for a second straight quarter, the Financial Times reported on Sunday, citing multiple people with knowledge of the matter.
Note this claim is about „operating profit“, which commonly is the revenue - operating expenses (COGS, rent, payroll). This does not include RnD cost.
>Anthropic's gross margins are above 80% before accounting for revenue shared with distribution partners, including Amazon (AMZN.O), and the cost of training its model, the newspaper said.
Gross margin is typically (revenue - COGS) / revenue. Thus, both statements above seem generally in line with commonly accepted accounting standards.
- yread 18d agoIf you are sharing revenue (royalties, licenses based on revenue, costs that scale directly with revenue) doesnt that count as cost of goods sold?
- infecto 18d agoTypically R&D is not part COGS. It’s absolutely part of the bottom line when you will typically recognize the cost over some period of time to try to get a true picture of the business. It’s also easier to strip it out of the picture to think about how much it costs to serve the next token. If you can have great economics to serve the next token (profitable) you can always figure out ways to further reduce your R&D costs. Now they are absolutely intertwined but I don’t think this is ever as big of an issue that people make it out to be. Replace token with any widget, this is how businesses measure themselves.
- _diyar 16d agoYes, but note that there are two claims in the article: 1) gross margins are 80% w/o revenue sharing. 2) gross margins are positive w/ revenue sharing. So that means Anthropic is making money on every token, and customers are willing to pay 80% margins (some of which might go to e.g. Bedrock to serve the model).
- yread 15d agorunning an AI business with 80% gross margin if you leave out the cost of the compute is not difficult. What other COGS even are there?