this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2026
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Impossible to imagine anything so extremely useful as AI not being profitable in the long run. No sarcasm.
In the long run you'd imagine that GPUs will become more affordable once these massive datacenters have been built. At that point it becomes far more profitable to run your own hardware. Especially if these AI companies need to increase their subscription prices by x10 to finance all this debt they've taken on.
Yeah AI is here to stay but these "founder" companies sure aren't.
Don't worry, they are already talking loudly about how much more "dangerous" those on-premise models are and suggesting that regulation is needed to make sure people only rent it from trusted facilities that can manage it.
They are certainly trying to kill local models and personal computing. I just don't think it's possible.
I see two ways this could happen:
They make it so you cannot run some models yourself without government approval, based on some criteria. For a random citizen, this would be harder than trying to stop piracy, and thus those willing to ignore the technical law may continue however they like, but it would be enough to block businesses from doing so. Kind of like how some software has a license that is a trap for businesses to have to pay if employees end up using it, but is widely popular among consumers that can get and use it freely. So the home market can do whatever if they really want, but the businesses and products those businesses launch can't ignore that sort of regulation so freely.
Another path is if they really get buy in that this is dangerous for mere peons to have: regulate hardware available for consumer purchase. Like no VRAM above 32GB, and nothing with the compute horsepower to go more than say 100 tok/s with a 32B model. Effectively setting a forever cap on home usage to current top-end 'consumer' and putting regulatory restrictions on beefier stuff. Consumer compute becomes just about improving power and cooling and form factor, no more expanding the capabilities beyond current top end.
It will definitely be profitable for the hardware makers. Companies whose entire value proposition depends on the model weights not leaking in an increasingly sloppy vulnerability-filled world of IT? Not so much.
Public libraries are also very useful. Doesn't mean they have to make money.
Bookstores, publishers, writers, etc etc are also very useful and profitable even with the existence of public libraries.
Assuming your assessment of AI utility is correct for sake of discussion, it would not mean it is guaranteed to be profitable for any given company with any given strategy and spending.
Internet shopping and delivery is hugely profitable, but that's of little comfort to pets.com and webvan.
If a company more responsibly managed their spend and commitments and still reached the same utility as Anthropic, then Anthropic would never see profitability.