posted in Technology
Other AI Companies Should Be Very Afraid of What Just Happened to Character.AI, According to Its Own Bankruptcy Documents: Be afraid.
futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-companies-afraid-characterai-bankrupcy
Replying to @eicker@lemmy.world
Anthropic made a smart business decision to mostly focus on enterprise customers rather than regular consumers. Only around 10% of their revenue comes from their heavily subsidized subscription plans. The remaining 90%ish comes from API and enterprise usage billed at per-token rates, which is something that’s actually profitable for them. They have a decent margin on token rates. It’s R&D, hardware, and subscriptions that are putting them in the red at the moment.
I suspect they’ll discontinue subscriptions some time after their IPO. Even though subscriptions are only responsible for 10% of revenue, they consume 42% of their inference compute power (www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/10/…/5301470)
In comparison, around 70% of OpenAI’s revenue comes from subscriptions. Without subsidized subscriptions, they’d lose most of their customers.
theregisterAnthropic Claude subscription plan provides more value than OpenAI's, study saysResearch firm not exactly thrilled by House of Altman's subscription changesAbsolutely. AI is an enterprise product - at least: for now. And Anthropic is in the pool position; eicker.news/@technews/117443237284007574
Replying to @eicker@lemmy.world
AI is an enterprise product
I think Google and Meta are well-positioned to provide AI services to regular people, since they both already have a large user base, existing cash flow from other non-AI products (meaning they can subsidize AI features for as long as they need to), and can probably outlast any startup. Google especially easily have enough paid users and advertisers to cover costs for free users.
Most of thr other AI companies will probably all end up focusing on / pivoting towards enterprise use cases though, for the higher prices and stability of long-term contracts.
Exactly. Enterprise is where AI can actually earn its keep: companies will pay serious money if it cuts costs or boosts revenue. Consumer chatbots are mostly a costly distribution strategy for now. The real customers have procurement budgets, not a $20 subscription and a dream.
Replying to @eicker@lemmy.world
Are Enterprise companies gonna wanna be fucked by hyperscalers the same way they are fucked by Microsoft?
I’d say no, they won’t. Without the vendor lock in, it will be cheaper and more secure to run open source models locally on your own hardware.
People are done outsourcing their essential workflows to non-competitive monopoly corporations.
Replying to @schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works
The funniest outcome would be hyperscalers spending billions convincing enterprises they need AI, only for those enterprises to deploy open-weight models on their own hardware. After decades of vendor lock-in, »we can run this ourselves« might be the most expensive sentence Microsoft ever hears. However, the reality in many organisations is also that they opt for the supposedly safer choice of turning to a third party, rather than taking action themselves.