Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei defected from OpenAI partly because he thought it wasn’t focusing enough on safety, but now his own company is fighting to balance its founding mission with commercial pressure.
In an interview with podcast host Dwarkesh Patel, Dario Amodei emphasized that Anthropic faces the same pressure as its competitors to keep innovating and ultimately become profitable
And yet, the company at the same time is managing a high-stakes balancing act between maintaining its mission and simply surviving, Amodei said.
“The pressure to survive economically, while also keeping our values, is just incredible. We’re trying to keep this 10x revenue curve going,” he said.
At the same time, the investors who are pouring billions of dollars into AI are desperate to get a return on their investment, Brian Jackson, the principal research director at technology research and advisory company Info-Tech Research Group, told Fortune.
Yet, part of the reason these AI companies may be delayed in turning a profit is the sheer cost of compute, including capital spending on data centers and GPUs or ongoing cloud bills, Jackson said. Costs like these weigh on the companies’ finances.
While a search may cost Google next to nothing while also bringing in revenue from ads, the price to prompt an LLM is higher, Jackson said.
“As AI scales and as more usage grows, they’re not necessarily going to get to that profitability as easily or as quickly, because the cost per prompt is so high,” he said.
